Four Stories

by Alan Bennett

  ‘They all do,’ said the nurse, ‘at this stage.’

  Midgley’s father lay propped up against the pillows, staring straight ahead through the window at a blank yellow wall. His arms lay outside the coverlet, palms upward as if accepting his plight and awaiting some sort of deliverance. They had put him into some green hospital pyjamas, with half-length sleeves the functionalism of which seemed too modish to Midgley, who had only ever seen his father in bed in striped pyjamas, or sometimes his shirt. The garment was open and a monitor clung to his chest, and above the bed the television screen blipped steady and regular. Midgley watched it for a moment.

  ‘Dad,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Dad. It’s me, Denis.’

  He put himself between the bed and the window so that if his father could see he would know he was there. He had read that stroke victims were never unconscious, just held incommunicado. ‘In the most solitary confinement,’ the article had said, the writer himself a doctor and too much taken with metaphor.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad.’

  He took a chair and sat halfway down the bed, putting his hand over his father’s inert palm.

  His father looked well in the face, which was ruddy and worn, the skin of his neck giving way sharply to the white of his body. The division between his known head and the unknown body had shocked Midgley when he had first seen it as a child, when his dad took him swimming at the local baths. It was still the same. He had never sat in the sun all his life.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ said Midgley.

  ‘Are you next of kin?’ It was another nurse.

  ‘Son.’

  ‘Not too long then.’

  ‘Is the doctor around?’

  ‘Why? What do you want to know? There’s nothing wrong, is there? No complaints?’

  ‘I want to know how he is.’

  ‘He’s very poorly. You can see.’

  She looked down at her left breast and lifted a watch.

  ‘Doctor’ll be round in about an hour. He’s very busy.’

  ‘I wonder where he is,’ said Aunty Kitty.

  ‘She said he was busy.’

  They were back in the waiting room.

  Aunty Kitty looked at him with what he imagined she imagined was a look of infinite sadness, mingled with pity (‘Sorrow and love flow mingling down’ came into his mind from the hymn). ‘Not the doctor, your dad, love. Behind that stare he’s somewhere, wandering. You know,’ she said vaguely, ‘in his mind. Where is he?’

  She patted his hand.

  ‘I don’t suppose with having been to university you believe in an after-life. That’s always the first casualty.’

  For a while she read the small print on her pension book and Midgley thought about his childhood. Nurses came and went, leading their own lives and a man wiped plastic-covered mattresses in the corridor. Every time a nurse came near he made remarks like ‘It’s all right for some’ or ‘No rest for the wicked’. Once the matron glided silently by, majestic and serene on her electric trolley. ‘They’re a new departure,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘I could do with one of those. I’ll just pop and have another peep at your dad.’

  ‘What does that look on his face mean?’ she said when she came back. Midgley thought it meant he should have gone over to see him last Sunday. It meant that his dad had been right about him all along and now he was dying and whose fault was that? That was what it meant. ‘This unit was opened by the Duchess of Kent,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘They have a tip-top kidney department.’

  The fascinations of medicine and royalty were equal in Aunty Kitty’s mind and whenever possible she found a connection between the two. Had she been told she was dying but from the same disease as a member of the Royal Family she would have died happy.

  ‘There’s some waiting done in hospitals,’ she said presently. ‘Ninety per cent of it’s waiting. Would you call this room oatmeal or cream?’

  A young man came through, crying.

  ‘His wife was in an accident,’ Aunty Kitty explained. ‘One of those head-on crashes. The car was a write-off. Did you come in your van?’

  Midgley nodded.

  ‘You’ll be one of these two-car families, then? Would you say she was black?’ A Thai nurse looked in briefly and went out again. ‘You don’t see that many of them. She’s happen a refugee.’

  Midgley looked at his watch. It was an hour since he had spoken to the nurse. He went in and stood at the desk but there was no one about. He stood at the door of his father’s room. He had not moved, his unseeing eyes fixed on a window-cleaner, who with professional discretion carefully avoided their gaze.

  ‘I always thought I’d be the first to go,’ said Aunty Kitty, looking at an advertisement in Country Life. ‘Fancy. Two swimming pools. I could do without two swimming pools. When you get to my age you just want somewhere you can get round nicely with the hoover. They’ve never got to the bottom of my complaint. They lowered a microscope down my throat but there was nothing. I wouldn’t live in Portugal if they paid me. Minstrels’ gallery, I shouldn’t know what to do with a minstrels’ gallery if I had one. Mr Penry-Jones wanted to put me on this machine the Duke of Gloucester inaugurated. This body-scan thing. Only there was such a long waiting-list apparently.’

  A nurse came through.

  ‘She’s the one I was telling you about. I asked her if your dad was in a coma or just unconscious. She didn’t know. They’re taking them too young these days.’

  ‘Aunty,’ said Midgley.

  ‘It isn’t as if she was black. Black you don’t expect them to know.’

  ‘What was my dad like?’

  Aunty Kitty thought for a moment.

  ‘He never had a wrong word for anybody. He’d do anybody a good turn. Shovel their snow. Fetch their coal in. He was that type. He was a saint. You take after your mother more.’

  ‘I feel I lack his sterling qualities,’ said Midgley some time later. ‘Grit. Patience. Virtues bred out of adversity.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think they’d have curtains in a hospital, would you?’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘You wouldn’t think curtains would be hygienic. I’m not keen on purple anyway.’

  ‘Deprivation for instance,’ said Midgley.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was never deprived. That way he deprived me. Do you understand?’

  ‘I should have gone to secondary school,’ she said. ‘I left at thirteen, same as your dad.’

  ‘I know I had it easier than he did,’ said Midgley. ‘But I was grateful. I didn’t take it for granted.’

  ‘You used to look bonny in your blazer.’

  ‘It isn’t particularly enjoyable, education.’ Midgley had his head in his hands. ‘I had what he wanted. Why should that be enjoyable?’

  ‘Mark’s got his bronze medal,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘Did you not ought to be ringing round?’

  ‘About the bronze medal?’

  ‘About your dad.’

  ‘I’ll wait till I’ve seen the doctor.’

  It was half-past six.

  ‘They go on about these silicon chips, you’d think they’d get all these complaints licked first, somebody’s got their priorities wrong. Then he’s always been a right keen smoker has Frank. Now he’s paying the price.’

  Midgley fell asleep.

  ‘Robert Donat had bronchitis,’ said Aunty Kitty.

  ‘MR MIDGLEY.’ The doctor shook his shoulder.

  ‘Denis,’ said Aunty Kitty, ‘it’s doctor.’

  He was a pale young Pakistani, and for a moment Midgley thought he had fallen asleep in class and was being woken by a pupil.

  ‘Mr Midgley?’ He was grave and precise, twenty-six at the most.

  ‘Your father has had a stroke.’ He looked at his clipboard. ‘How severe it is hard to tell. When he was brought in he was suffering from hypothermia.’

  Aunty Kitty gave a faint cry. It was a scourge that had been much in the news.

  ‘He must have fallen and been lying there, two days at least.
’

  ‘I generally go over at weekends,’ said Midgley.

  ‘Pneumonia has set in. His heart is not strong. All things considered,’ he looked at the clipboard again, ‘we do not think he will last the night.’

  As he went away he tucked the clipboard under his arm and Midgley saw there was nothing on it.

  ‘ONLY THREE PHONES and two of them duff. You wouldn’t credit it,’ said a fat man. ‘Say you were on standby for a transplant. It’d be just the same.’ He jingled his coins and a young man in glasses on the working phone put his head outside the helmet.

  ‘I’ve one or two calls to make,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said the fat man.

  ‘There’s a phone outside Physio. Try there,’ said a passing nurse.

  ‘I’ll try there,’ said the fat man.

  Midgley sat on.

  ‘Hello,’ said the young man brightly. ‘Dorothy? You’re a grandma.’ He looked at Midgley while he was talking, but without seeing him.

  ‘A grandma,’ he shouted. ‘Yes!’ There was a pause. ‘Guess,’ said the young man and listened. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Girl. Seven and a half pounds. 5.35. Both doing well. I’m ringing everybody. Bye, Grandma.’

  Midgley half rose as the young man put the receiver back, but sat back as he consulted a bit of paper then picked it up again and dialled.

  ‘Hello, Neil. Hi. You’re an uncle … You’re an uncle. Today. Just now. 5.35. Well, guess.’ He waited. ‘No. Girl. No. I’m over the moon. So you can tell Christine she’s an aunty. Yes, a little cousin for Josephine. How’s it feel to be an uncle? … Bye.’

  Midgley got up and stood waiting. The young man took another coin and dialled again. It was a way of breaking news that could be adapted for exits as well as entrances, thought Midgley.

  ‘Hello, Margaret. You’re a widow. A widow … This afternoon. Half-past two … How’s it feel to be bereaved?’

  ‘Betty,’ said the young man. ‘Congratulations. You’re an aunty. Aunty Betty. I won’t ask you to guess,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘It’s a girl. Susan’s over the moon. And I am.’

  With each call his enthusiasm had definitely decreased. Midgley reflected that this baby was well on the way to being a bore and it was only a couple of hours old.

  ‘I’m just telephoning with the glad tidings. Bye, Aunty.’

  The proud father put a new pile of coins on the box and Midgley was moved to intervene.

  ‘Could I just make one call?’

  ‘Won’t it wait,’ said the young man. ‘I was here first. I’m a father.’

  ‘I’m a son,’ said Midgley. ‘My father’s dying.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone,’ said the young man, stepping out of the helmet. ‘You should have spoken up. There’s a phone outside Physio.’

  Midgley listened to the phone ringing along the passage at his father’s brother’s house.

  ‘Uncle Ernest? It’s Denis. Dad’s been taken poorly.’

  ‘You mean Frank?’ said his uncle.

  ‘Yes. Dad. He’s had a stroke,’ said Midgley. ‘And a fall. And now he’s got pneumonia.’ Somehow he felt he ought to have selected two out of three, not laid everything on the line first go off.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ said his uncle. ‘Our Frank.’

  ‘Can you ring round and tell anybody who might want to come. The doctor says he won’t last the night.’

  ‘From here? Me ring?’

  It started pipping.

  ‘Yes. I’m in a box. There are people waiting.’

  ‘You never know,’ said the young man. ‘They can work miracles nowadays.’

  ‘THIS IS WHAT I’D CALL an industrial lift,’ said Uncle Ernest, tapping the wall with his strong boot. ‘It’s not an ordinary passenger lift, this. It’s as big as our sitting-room.’

  It stopped and a porter slid a trolley in beside Midgley. A woman looked up at him and smiled faintly.

  ‘Is it working?’ said the porter. The little head closed its eyes.

  ‘We’ve just had a nice jab and now we’re going for a ta ta.’

  Behind a glass panel Midgley watched the concrete floors pass.

  ‘It’s very solidly constructed,’ said Uncle Ernest, looking at the floor. ‘These are overlapping steel plates. We can still do it when we try.’

  ‘Let the dog see the rabbit,’ said the porter as the lift stopped.

  ‘This is six,’ said Midgley.

  ‘Every floor looks the same to me,’ said his uncle.

  ‘Did you ring our Hartley?’ Hartley was Uncle Ernest’s son and a chartered accountant.

  ‘He’s coming as soon as he can get away.’

  ‘Was he tied up?’

  He had been.

  ‘Secretary was it? Was he in a meeting? I’d like to know what they are, these meetings he’s always in, that he can’t speak to his father. “Excuse me, I have to speak to my father.” That’s no disgrace, is it? “I won’t be a moment, my dad’s on the line.” Who’s going to take offence at that? Who are they, in these meetings? Don’t they have fathers? I thought fathers were universal. Instead of which I have to make an appointment to see my own son. Sons, fathers, you shouldn’t need appointments. You should get straight through. You weren’t like that with your dad. Frank thought the world of you.’

  They were going down the long corridor again.

  ‘I came on the diesel,’ said Uncle Ernest. He was lame in one leg.

  ‘I go all over. I went to York last week. Saw the railway museum. There’s stock in there I drove. Museum in my own lifetime. I’ll tell you one thing.’

  They stopped.

  ‘What,’ said Midgley.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to have to polish this floor.’

  They resumed.

  ‘You still schoolteaching?’

  Midgley nodded.

  ‘Pleased your dad, did that. Though it won’t be much of a salary. You’d have been better off doing something in our Hartley’s line. He’s up there in the £30,000 bracket now. She was talking about a swimming pool.’

  They stopped at the entrance to Intensive Care while his uncle stood, one arm stretched out to the wall, taking the weight off his leg.

  ‘Is your Aunty Kitty here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought she would be. Where no vultures fly.’

  AUNTY KITTY got up and did her ‘I am too upset to speak’ act. ‘Hello, Kitty,’ said Ernest.

  ‘I always thought I should be the first, Ernest.’

  ‘Well you still might be. He’s not dead yet.’

  ‘Go in, Ernest.’ She dabbed her nose. ‘Go in.’

  Uncle Ernest stood by his brother’s bed. Then he sat down.

  ‘This is summat fresh for you, Frank,’ he said. ‘You were always such a bouncer.’ He stood up and leaned over the bed to look closer at the bleeps on the scanner. They were bouncing merrily. A nurse looked in.

  ‘You’re not to touch that.’

  ‘I was just interested.’

  ‘He’s very ill.’

  She paused for a moment, came further into the room and looked at the scanner. She looked at Uncle Ernest (though not, he noticed, at Frank) and went out.

  ‘It’s all mechanised now,’ he said.

  There was no sound in the room. The brothers had never had much to say to each other at the best of times. Without there being any animosity, they felt easier in the presence of a third party; alone they embarrassed each other. It was still the case, even though one of them was unconscious, and Uncle Ernest got up, thankful to be able to go.

  ‘Ta-ra then, butt,’ he said.

  And waited.

  He wanted to pat his brother’s hand.

  ‘I went to York last week,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t changed much. They haven’t spoiled it like they have Leeds. Though there’s one of these precinct things. It’s the first time I’ve been since we were lads. We went over on our bikes once.’ Instead of touching his brother’s hand he jo
gged his foot in farewell, just as the nurse was coming in.

  ‘He’s very ill,’ she said, smoothing the coverlet over his brother’s feet. ‘And this is delicate equipment.’

  ‘I went in,’ she said in the canteen later, ‘and there was one of them pulling a patient’s leg about. He had hold of his foot. It’s an uphill battle.’

  UNCLE ERNEST’S SON Hartley came with his wife Jean and their children, Mark (14) and Elizabeth (10). Hartley hated hospitals, hence his demand for full family back-up. He was actually surprised that Mark had condescended to come: a big fourteen, Mark had long since passed beyond parental control and only appeared with the family on state occasions. The truth was that Miss Pollock, who took him for Religious Knowledge and who was known to be fucking at least one of the sixth form, had pointed out only last week how rare were the opportunities these days of seeing a dead person, and thus of acquiring a real perspective on the human condition. Mark was hoping this visit might gain him some status in the eyes of Miss Pollock. Sensitive to the realities of birth and death, he hoped to be the next candidate for ‘bringing out’.

  They were all going up in the lift.

  ‘Think on,’ said Hartley. ‘It’s quite likely your grandad’ll be here. I don’t want you asking for all sorts in front of him.’

  ‘No,’ said his wife. ‘We don’t want him saying you’re spoiled.’

  ‘Though you are spoiled,’ said Hartley.

  ‘Whose fault is that?’ said Jean.

  The steel doors folded back to reveal Denis saying goodbye to Uncle Ernest.

  ‘Now then, Dad,’ said Hartley. ‘Hello, Denis. This is a bad do.’

  Jean kissed the old man.

  ‘Give your grandad a kiss, Elizabeth.’

  The child did so.

  ‘Come on, Mark.’

  ‘I don’t kiss now,’ said the boy.

  ‘You kiss your grandad,’ said Hartley and the boy did so and a nurse, passing, looked.

  ‘How is he?’ said Hartley.

  ‘Dying,’ said his father. ‘Sinking fast.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ said Hartley, who had hoped it would be all over by now.

  ‘And how’ve you been keeping?’ said Jean, brightly.

  ‘Champion,’ said Uncle Ernest. ‘Is that one of them new watches?’ He took Mark’s wrist.

  ‘He had to save up for it,’ said Jean. ‘You had to save up for it, didn’t you, Mark?’