‘Look, just because I don’t talk about my mum all the time doesn’t mean she isn’t important to me.’
‘Oh, poor Rich!’ exclaimed Alice, with such a knowing look—as if needing to underline what life as an oxymoron might feel like.
No, running home to mum was not the answer. And picking up on the uneasy silence that followed, Alice let the topic drop. There and then, in the empty street, she took my arm. Side by side, as lovers do, towards her room, we walked—me gratefully taking a last glance back towards the houses, their laundry waving its offered surrender, and the street lights’ globes of amber on their arching concrete poles.
As I say, a message had come down from the private ward to the effect that they were having difficulties with a very important person, so I stepped with excited anticipation into the lift and pressed the button for the private ward. It would be the first and last time I ever went there. At the reception desk, Sister and a cabal of consultants were confabulating around the phones. One of them had a sanatorium on the line, and was explaining that their patient was suffering from a pre-senile dementia, but that it could be significantly retarded with the right cocktail of drugs. The patient, a managing director of some big electronics firm or other, would soon be able to resume his post, regardless, and for many years to come. The hospital had admitted him that morning in a condition dangerous to himself and those around him. At this discreet sanatorium, somewhere in the Home Counties, the drugs could be administered; and this very important person would be nursed back to socially useful lucidity. An ambulance had been ordered for early that afternoon.
‘Good,’ said Sister, turning from the phones. ‘You must be the replacement porter.’
‘I’m afraid he was rather hyperactive earlier in the day,’ she said, as we set off down the spotless corridor with its rows of private rooms, their doors all firmly closed.
‘They said in Outpatients that he could be violent?’
‘No, not really,’ Sister replied. ‘He settled down once we gave him something, and I don’t think he’s been any trouble to your friend here. However, I would recommend that you keep a healthy distance. Agree with whatever he tells you. Don’t be doing anything that might at all upset him; and don’t, whatever you do, try to restrain him if he does become agitated. Call for assistance. There’s an emergency bell on the edge of the bedside cabinet—on the right as you face it. If you think he’s becoming even the slightest bit out of control and you’re getting into difficulties, use it. We’ll have an ambulance here for him before you can say Jack Robinson. But I don’t think you need expect much of an ordeal.’
Sister opened the locked door to a large, well-furnished room. Steve was standing over by the windows. They were open, for the cooling breeze, but caged in with close wire mesh to guard against suicide attempts like the one that had offered a release to our student of Proust. Turning as he heard the two of us enter, Steve came striding towards the door.
‘See you later,’ he said to a large man in loose-fitting winceyette pyjamas who was pacing restlessly back and forth about the scrubbed and polished floor. Then Steve gave one of his infectious smirks, and a wink as he slipped out of the room for his lunch break. Sister also proffered a reassuring smile and closed the door, leaving me alone with this very important patient.
‘Come over here, young man,’ said the dementia sufferer. ‘I want to show you something.’
He was stoutly built, with thin grey hair that must have usually been combed back over his head in a controlled wave. Today, it fell sideways in the shape of a ski-slope over one ear. He had small, but well-defined features. The sagging skin of his face showed broken blood vessels flecking the upper parts of his cheeks. On top of the striped pyjamas, whose trouser bottoms fell in loose folds over his slippers, he was wearing a white towelling bathrobe.
‘You are a doctor, are you not?’
‘I am, yes … I am.’
‘May I ask you what kind of doctor? You certainly don’t look old enough to be a doctor. You must be completing your training. Tell me, precisely how many years does it take to qualify?’
‘Oh, about seven,’ I guessed.
‘Whatever you do,’ the patient continued, ‘don’t become one of those pill doctors. They don’t do you any good at all, and I should know. Damn pill doctors for drug addicts wasting the public’s money, that’s what I say. Take my advice, young man, do you hear, go into surgery. You be a surgeon. They’re the only bona fide doctors. You are a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I’m training to be one.’
‘Well, come over here, then, my good fellow, and let me show you just what’s been driving me right round the bend!’
Warily, I advanced a couple of steps as the important patient strode over to the window, leaning out as far as he could until his forehead was touching the wire-mesh cage.
‘A surgeon is exactly what I need, of course. Had enough of these tuppenny ha’penny pill pushers. They’re no damn good, the lot of them. What I’m here for is my operation. I’m waiting for my operation. You’re aware of that, are you not?’
‘I am, yes.’
A faint breeze from the open windows caught the disordered remnants of his hair.
‘You’re not lying to me, are you, young man?’ he said, his voice beginning to rise. ‘You’re not one of those pill doctor fellows, by any chance? No good to me, if you are. Let me tell you, you might as well get right out of here this minute if you’re one of their sort, you hear me.’
Down in Queen Square the thick layers of leaves above its garden barely stirred with that faint breeze. The August sun was at its height, the narrowest of shadows outlining the tiny bodies stretched out on the grass below. Between the leaves I could intuit the outlines of secretaries and nurses who had raised skirts well above their bare knees to improve and extend the tanning of their legs. There were some doctors sitting talking in shirtsleeves, ties loosened, top buttons undone. Technicians and porters lay on their backs, some with their shirts removed, making the most of that scorching lunch hour. An ambulance arrived. Two porters were carrying another stretcher up into reception.
Pigeons and sparrows were alighting around the fountain with its water UNFIT FOR DRINKING. And there you were sitting on a bench nearby with your high rounded forehead, the determined expression of your mouth in repose, your dark brown straight hair, parted in the centre and falling to your shoulders. You were finishing your packet of homemade sandwiches and dusting the crumbs from your flowery smock. Birds were pecking at the few scraps you threw them, coming up close to you, no distance at all, almost eating from your hand. By then I knew you had given in, had agreed to meet up in Brussels after my week in the Netherlands. But why had you agreed to that? Maybe you thought it wouldn’t last with her, wouldn’t even survive the week in Holland. No doubt you were giving me one last chance. And, in a way, I suppose that’s what I got.
Others might say that the best thing in the circumstances would have been a clean break, but, of course, there’s no such thing. The hurt to come from not breaking up was something that nobody could have predicted, though with hindsight this plan of mine looked crazy enough to deserve some foreboding. But the trouble with being young is you think you’re immortal. I should have known better.
I should have known better. But now you were glancing down at your watch, twisting your wrist round to see the face at your pulse, the thin black ribbon you used as a replacement strap quite visible. Then, your lunch hour over, you stood up from the bench and set off in the direction of Great Ormond Street. As you did so, always a great devourer of crime, you dropped a green Penguin Marjorie Allingham who-dun-it into your embroidered shoulder bag.
‘Just look at that! Look at that laziness! Get back to work right now, will you?’ It was the chairman, leaning out as far as he could, shouting through the cage, shaking his fists, as if the sunbathing hospital staff down below could hea
r and would take notice of him.
‘Get back to work, I tell you,’ he yelled. ‘Would you be so kind, young man, as to go straight down to the shop floor and order those wastrels back to work?’
But who did he think he was talking to now? Yet no sooner had he uttered the words, than the chairman seemed entirely to forget them. His head had been pressed so fiercely against the window cage wire that its mesh was lifting in red lines across his wrinkled brow. He turned back to the scene below.
‘How many times have I said it? Just tell me how many? What do the shareholders expect me to do? We’ll never meet our deadlines if I don’t get an agreement from the workforce. The workforce, you call them? They’re ignoramuses. They don’t even know the meaning of the word. AEG are moving in. They’re just waiting for their chance. Breathing down my neck, by God. And I’m telling you, they’ll do anything to avoid a decent day’s work. What do the shareholders expect me to do? Put the stuff on to the wagons myself? Only look at them now! Believe me, it has to stop. I’d go down myself, but there’s a young man with me here who’s training to be a surgeon. Put me through to Harold immediately. No, a meeting with him, an hour will do, any time early next week. Just now I’m waiting for my operation. An hour is all I need with him to sort this whole mess out once and for all. I’ve been telling him for months. Telefunken are strong. They’ve got something new up their sleeves. But what has Harold ever done about it I’d like to know? Can’t get them back to work either, whatever he tells the country. Just give me an hour with the PM. I’ll make him see sense, let me tell you. Can’t match their delivery dates. All because you scum down there won’t lift a finger, scroungers and yobbos the lot of you. Something for nothing! All they want is something for nothing! Get back to work, why don’t you? This young man I have here with me, he’s got the right idea. He’s going to be a surgeon, a real doctor, not one of your pill-pushers wasting the public’s money. We need more people like him! Yes, just get Wilson on the phone right now. Go to the top, young man. Believe me, it’s the only way. Don’t, whatever you do, get tied up with the secretaries. Tied up with the secretaries! Get back to your posts! Get back to your work places. For God’s sake, why don’t you? They should take my advice, do you hear, young man. Get rid of these foreign pill-pushers. Look at them down there, flat on their backs. Having sex, is it? Is that what they’re up to now?’
CHAPTER 7
At the very end of August, on my last Friday at the National, I took all my savings from the Lloyds Bank in Great Ormond Street and closed the account. There was time enough during my lunch hour to visit the Barclays with a foreign currency counter on Southampton Row and change a portion for the week ahead. The Dutch money was brightly coloured, as if by a De Stijl designer, with bold angular shapes and portraits of famous Dutchmen like the poet Vondel, or Spinoza the philosopher. It had a crispy feel and a cheerful look—as if it wasn’t really money at all.
Leaving the hospital meant giving up my cupboard in Finsbury Park. You had moved into a home for juveniles in Paddington. Reluctantly, though doubtless with your own hopes in mind, you were letting me, your practically ex-boyfriend, spend my last few nights there before leaving. It might have seemed I was simply using you, but here at last, and maybe not too late, was a flat big enough for the both of us to fit in.
From your kitchen window I could see the flyovers, underpasses, and skyscrapers stamped with words. The early sun cast strong, sharp shadows across the area’s concrete pillars and frontages. Traffic on the Westway was at a standstill; silver-grey Metropolitan Line trains were clattering on; an Intercity express was heading out west; a barge moved away from its moorings beside the gardens in the Little Venice Basin. Heaped in the corner of your living room were my winter clothes, a pile of books, boxes of paints, filled sketchpads, and two files of assorted art history notes.
You hadn’t been at the place long enough to make up your mind about the new job yet, though the way you’d been greeted on arriving, you told me—well, it was hardly promising.
‘We’re so glad you’re joining us,’ the director announced as you stepped through the blue street doors.‘The previous girl ran away. I expect you’ll be of immense value to our little team, though. Poor Sharon, she had a very tough time of it, but I’m sure you’ll cope. We had to let her go. Never mind, never mind.’
Your flat was on the fifth floor. The senior social worker, Danny, had rooms on the same level as the children, but he was usually sleeping somewhere else for amorous reasons of his own. The inmates, mostly teenage boys, were from broken homes in estates across the Edgware Road. The aim of the institution was to help the younger children get some schooling, and the older find work and a place to rent.
‘What’ll you do when you grow up?’ the director asked a boy called Justin one day.
‘A bank,’ said the lad, laughing into his face.
It was no joke. At that very moment, over the insistently lifting beat of a Bob Marley record, banging noises came up from the children’s living quarters. The kids were obviously hurling things around the room. You had advised your maybe still boyfriend just to ignore them. But that was easier said than done. As the morning wore on, those crashes and rumblings continued unabated from the floor below.
‘Best not over-react,’ you said, and tried to illustrate how not to do so.
A little while later, and as if to prove your point, you decided to slip out a moment to your new bank in Westbourne Grove. Not wanting to be left alone with the kids, I volunteered to keep you company. Once beyond the Settlement’s doors, we turned left down Warwick Crescent and walked briskly along beside the Regent’s Canal in the direction of its black iron bridge. The grass in Rembrandt Gardens was all but shrivelled away, and had been kicked through on the traffic islands to the grey dust beneath. That summer, every day’s weather exactly like the last, it had been easy to lose track of time, to assume that August would go on forever, that September could never come. Barely any clouds crossed the sky above to variegate the yellow grass or grey pavements with shadows. We crossed the iron bridge and went on past a French restaurant, the Warwick Castle pub, and one of your favourite antique shops. In its window hung a Persian carpet and, like make-believe homemakers, we paused a moment to admire it once more. When we got to Warwick Avenue’s tree-lined dual carriageway, you led me round to the left and down towards the Tube.
‘Be careful,’ you were saying, as we passed by the ramshackle newsagent’s stand, its shutters down—as if drained of the meanings which issued from it day after day, attaching themselves for a moment to those surroundings, a capital city on the cusp of earliest autumn.
‘Careful of what?’
We were waiting at the zebra crossing.
‘She’s toying with you, you know.’
‘Well, I don’t know … is she?’
‘Just be careful you don’t come running back after this little fling of yours asking me to pretend that nothing has happened,’ you said. ‘You might very well find I’m not there any more.’
Oh if only I’d taken you at your word. You should never have agreed to meet me in Brussels. Experimenting too, I must have thought that the rules had been changed for everyone, or, if not, that they should have been. But perhaps every generation believes it can get away with anything, as if the rules of previous ones somehow no longer applied. That summer it had really got far, far too hot, though Italy I knew would be hotter. So it was a relief to be out of the sun and inside the bank. Up at the heavy wooden counter, you found your blue passport in the shoulder bag and presented it to the cashier.
‘I’d like to change ten pounds into Italian money, and to have forty pounds of travellers’ cheques, please.’
The teller was a well-dressed, neatly made-up woman wearing a badge. Her name was Mrs. Joy Worthy. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose, and there was a mole on the side of her chin with a single fine hair sprouting from it.
‘Have you ever used travellers’ cheques before?’ she inquired.
You hadn’t. Now she was asking you to sign them.
‘You’ll have to countersign them in the presence of the cashier when you change them, and don’t forget to make a note of all the cheques you cash. If they’re lost or stolen, you must telephone this number in London immediately.’ She pointed at the slip of paper showing their numbers and a list of contact addresses.
Then you wrote a small cheque to ‘Self’. You folded the Lire and traveller’s cheques into one compartment of your purse. The five pounds for the next five days were squeezed into your jeans’ back pocket.
There was a portable fan set up behind the bank tellers’ counter. It made a faint whirring sound. Even so, the cashier could be heard complaining about the weather as we stepped out into the late summer light and unremitting heat.
Hurrying back across the iron-bridge, you were glancing over at that great white house, the children’s home, which commanded its far corner of the Paddington Basin. The building containing the private welfare centre had begun the century as a hostel for music students—one of them Katherine Mansfield, you told me. This patch of London was also George Dixon’s beat in The Blue Lamp. The night before that old black and white film had been on the TV, and we’d sat seeing parts of the world outside your window bisected by Flying Squad cars. Their alarm bells rang out as they chased a youthful, delinquent Dirk Bogarde with his handgun through pieces of an urban scene barely still surviving between new developments all around.
That day, half a dozen red and green barges were moored in the basin. Pot plants along the cabin roofs were sagging in the sunlight. White façades of grander terraces gleamed beyond the shimmering water and the curving wall to the bridge. The weeping willows on their tiny island trembled in the currents of warm air. Another barge was chugging steadily past it, slipping under the bridges on towards Camden Lock. I too was gazing around as we re-crossed the little iron bridge, looking out past the white house by the water, another fast train leaving from Paddington, on the elevated flyover a car heading eastward … when suddenly a loud splash came echoing from that part of the Regent’s Canal.
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