The Proper Procedure and Other Stories

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Miss Lee went, of course; she always did what Mr Montagu suggested. But the broad, no less than the subtle, comedy of the play escaped her. She sat through it with the immobile expression of a professional mourner. It was as if there was nothing in the world, past, present or to come, to laugh at.

  She continued to spend three or four nights a week in Mr Montagu’s company, but appeared to derive no pleasure from it. Neither, now, did Mr Montagu; quite the reverse in fact. These complications were precisely what he had not wanted; he hated the tension of things that were unsaid. He began to curse himself for an old fool for having mixed himself up in such a situation, against which (as he now saw) anyone would have advised him had he asked. A fool and his tranquillity are soon parted.

  How clear and straightforward were business affairs by comparison with affairs of the heart! You bought or you sold, and that was that; no silent reproaches, no hidden meanings, everything could be put down in black and white. Mr Montagu began to dread the arrival of Miss Lee, and would retreat to his papers in his study when she came, pleading matters that required his immediate attention to avoid her company, or her presence, which seemed to affect the room she was in like sound-proofing, deadening the slightest noise.

  This can’t go on, thought Mr Montagu, but he thought it for quite a long time before he did anything about it. Eventually, he plucked up the courage to say something.

  ‘Victoria, this isn’t working.’

  A flicker of distress agitated Miss Lee’s face for a moment, before it settled back into immobility.

  ‘I mean, you’re not getting any pleasure from my company, and therefore I feel bad too. And let’s face it, the whole point is to enjoy ourselves.’

  Miss Lee looked past him, hardly blinking.

  ‘We’re both too old for domestic scenes,’ he added.

  Miss Lee considered for a moment and then stood up. She walked to the bedroom where she had a capacious embroidered bag in which she had brought her personal things to the flat, and began to pack it. It was obvious that she was preparing to leave.

  ‘Victoria,’ said Mr Montagu, suddenly wondering whether, after all, it couldn’t go on, ‘can’t we talk about it?’

  But Miss Lee continued her round of collecting her things. When she had finished, she went to the front door, Mr Montagu following her.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Montagu,’ she said, and left, shutting the door behind her.

  Three days after Miss Lee’s departure, Mr Montagu received a call from hospital – not the one in which Miss Lee worked.

  ‘Mr Montagu?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘You are the fiancé of Victoria Lee?’

  Mr Montagu was taken aback to be so described. But he sensed that the moment was not opportune to explain the precise state of his relations with Miss Lee.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said.

  ‘She’s out of intensive care,’ said the voice from the hospital.

  ‘I didn’t know...’

  ‘She took an overdose. She’s out of danger.’

  Mr Montagu felt a mixture of relief and annoyance, perhaps with the latter predominating. He could foresee a prolonged period of turmoil, useless but time and energy-consuming, ahead. The prospect depressed him. He had hoped for a clean break.

  ‘Can I tell her you will be visiting?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  He was aware that he sounded ungracious, but he had wanted to refuse. Of course, the person at the other end of the line couldn’t be expected to know that his reply was a compromise between obligation and inclination.

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  With a reluctance that manifested itself as a dragging sensation in the pit of his now-healed stomach, Mr Montagu went to the hospital. He took some flowers and found the ward in which Miss Lee was a patient. She had a room of her own.

  Their meeting was not a reconciliation. Miss Lee did not smile when he entered and though he tried to do so himself, he was aware that it must have looked more like a snarl, a baring of fangs, than a smile. For some reason the title of a best-selling book of a few years before, What Do You Say after You’ve Said Hello, ran through his mind.

  Miss Lee was barely monosyllabic, and when Mr Montagu told her that it had been raining on his way to the hospital, she turned her head from him. His words sounded ridiculous, and polite conversation was now out of the question; so, however, was anything more to the point. After half an hour during which nothing had been concluded or even broached, he left with relief.

  The next day he received another call from the hospital.

  ‘Miss Lee has been transferred to the psychiatric ward.’

  Mr Montagu asked why, though the answer, really, was obvious.

  ‘She’s refusing to eat. She hardly speaks. She says she wants to die and will kill herself.’

  Mr Montagu went to the psychiatric ward. He met the doctor there in charge of the case who asked him whether he could throw any light on Miss Lee’s state of mind. Had she ever been like this before? Mr Montagu didn’t know. Did she drink a lot? A glass or two of wine at most, and then not every day. Did she gamble (the Chinese were great gamblers)? Not as far as he knew. What, then?

  The doctor was considerably younger than Mr Montagu, closer to the age at which one might expect chagrins d’amour. Mr Montagu therefore felt embarrassed by what he had to relate, but he felt it was his duty to relate it.

  ‘Everything went well,’ he said, ‘until her mother came from Malaya. For some reason she exerts an all-powerful influence on her daughter. She obviously told her that she had to marry me. Ever since then, Victoria changed. She became quiet and sullen. I couldn’t get a word out of her. To be honest, I couldn’t stand it anymore.’

  ‘Before that, you were happy?’

  ‘Yes, very. We did everything together. Then her mother came along.’

  ‘And spoiled everything by insisting that Victoria married you?’

  ‘Yes, I couldn’t understand why. After all, it’s only a piece of paper.’

  The doctor paused for a moment.

  ‘If it’s only a piece of paper,’ he asked, ‘why don’t you sign it?’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Mr Montagu. ‘You don’t do things just because it doesn’t matter whether you do them or not.’

  The doctor said nothing, and Mr Montagu felt slightly uncomfortable, as if he had just failed an oral exam.

  ‘I’m not giving in to blackmail,’ he said.

  The doctor made a non-committal sound and then told Mr Montagu that Miss Lee had announced to the staff that she would kill herself at four o’clock in the afternoon, in two days’ time, unless Mr Montagu had offered to marry her by then.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ said Mr Montagu. ‘It wouldn’t be a good foundation for a marriage, would it?’

  The doctor studiously avoided taking sides. He merely said:

  ‘I think she means it.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Mr Montagu. ‘People who talk about it never actually do it.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s a myth,’ said the doctor. ‘Most people who kill themselves have let someone know beforehand.’

  ‘But still most people who talk about it don’t do it,’ said Mr Montagu. ‘That’s the important thing to remember.’

  ‘Besides,’ said the doctor, ‘you have to remember two things. The Chinese set great store by not losing face. If they’ve said they’re going to do something, they feel they have to do it, or they will lose face. She’s told a lot of people she’s going to kill herself. And the second thing you have to remember is her personality.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Does she strike you as the kind of person to make idle threats? She’s not an adolescent girl.’

  Mr Montagu drew in a deep breath.

  ‘I can’t just give in to her,’ he said, ‘can I?’

  The doctor didn’t reply. Instead, he said:

  ‘Of course,
we’ll try to look after her. Things will change in time, they always do.’

  ‘They’ll have to,’ said Mr Montagu, sounding firm but feeling apprehensive. And he left the hospital.

  On the day and at the time appointed, Miss Lee did try to kill herself. A nurse had been deputed to keep her within sight at all times, but she was young and inexperienced, and Miss Lee prevailed on her to allow her to go alone to the toilet. The nurse did not see how she could refuse: a necessity was a necessity, even if you were suicidal. So she let her go and waited outside.

  When it dawned on her that Miss Lee was being a strangely long time, the nurse called out ‘Are you all right?’ to which Miss Lee replied that she was.

  But shortly thereafter, at four o’clock precisely, the nurse heard a thump on the ground.

  ‘Are you all right, Vicky?’ she asked anxiously.

  There was no answer, only a faint gurgling sound.

  The nurse gave the door, which was of flimsy construction, a kick; but flimsy as it was, it did not open. She went to get help.

  When the door was broken down (the key that was supposed to open it from the outside having been lost), Miss Lee was found slumped on the narrow strip of the floor. She had hidden a nylon stocking about her, wrapped it round her neck and pulled sharply on the two ends.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do it like that,’ said a male nurse.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said the nurse in charge. ‘Let’s pull her out and give her mouth-to-mouth.’

  Fortunately, Miss Lee, who had not been breathing when they found her, came round quite quickly. It would have been difficult to explain how and why, when it was documented so clearly that she had announced the time and day of her suicide, she had been able to carry out her threat. The enquiry would not have accepted the excuse that she asked to go to the toilet a quarter of an hour before the event: everyone would have been blamed, as if the job were an easy one.

  When Miss Lee came round, she appeared surprised and disappointed at first, but then she became docile and obedient. She accused herself of foolishness and apologised to the staff for all the trouble she had caused. She said she had learned her lesson and would never do such a thing again. This enabled the staff to report to the doctor that her attempts had been only a gesture, a manifestation of her manipulative personality. They called it ‘behaviour,’ the opposite of illness, and a term of reproach.

  At any rate, her attempted self-strangling seemed to have acted as a catharsis on Miss Lee. She became cheerful – ‘But not too cheerful,’ the nurses added – and helped around the ward as if she were one of the staff rather than a patient. One of the young doctors, an enthusiast, discoursed on the effect of a shock on the chemicals in the brain that brought about this change. He made strangulation sound like therapy.

  Miss Lee asked to leave the hospital, and there seemed no good reason to deny her request. Indeed, there was no reason why she should not return to work, as she said she wanted. And so she left.

  The staff informed Mr Montagu by telephone of her departure; he thanked them politely, but said that she was not a relative of his.

  Miss Lee returned to work, but shortly afterwards her annual holiday was due. She went on holiday.

  Three months later, Mr Montagu received a telephone call from Miss Lee’s hospital, from someone who called herself the Director of Nursing. Did he know anything of Miss Lee’s whereabouts? She had not returned from her holiday, which was most unlike her because she was so punctilious in the performance of her duty.

  Mr Montagu knew nothing. How, indeed, could he have known anything? Two months before, Miss Lee’s body had been found floating in the sluggish brown river there, and deaths in Malaya are not usually notified in England.

  6 - Identity Crisis

  When the staff of the Roxy-Carlton Cinema opened it for the midday showing of a film that no one wanted to see, at any rate at that time of day, they were surprised to observe a man leave the hall in a furtive, sideways fashion. He must have slept there overnight.

  ‘Hey, you…’ one of the staff shouted, but the man took no notice and slipped out of the cinema’s front door into the street outside, rushing down the street and not looking back. The staff of the cinema soon forgot about him. Luckily, he had left no mess behind him that they would have felt mildly obliged to clear up

  The man was about forty years old, slightly built and an inch or two below medium height, with no obvious features that would have imprinted them on anyone’s memory at first glance. There was no reason for anyone to take any notice of him.

  The cinema was in the middle of a busy shopping street in a fashionable-enough quarter of the vast city. When he had slowed down fully clear of the cinema, the man looked right and left to decide which way to go; but since he recognised nothing, and had no purpose to fulfil, the decision was an arbitrary one, the most difficult kind to take. How we depend upon circumstances to take our decisions for us! But the man had no circumstances to speak of and therefore his mind was blank when he considered the question. Only his desire not to be seen to be loitering, which might have drawn the attention of people to him, impelled him forward; therefore, he turned left.

  He slowed his pace once he was certain that he was out of sight of the cinema staff. He had nothing to do, but the mind abhors a vacuum and so he stopped at every shop window to stare intently in, as if he had never in his life seen the kind of things displayed in them. A pharmacy with a display of a new medicated shampoo was as amazing to him as an antique shop displaying old red-lacquered Chinese furniture and a bronze mythological lion. It was as if, for him, the world was entirely new; as if he were discovering the existence of flowers in a stand outside a grocer’s, and of newspapers outside a newsagent’s. ‘Prime Minister in Trouble:’ what was a Prime Minister? It was as if he had been born able to read, but knowing absolutely nothing else.

  He walked on. People passed him in the street without taking any notice of him. He recognised no one, and no one recognised him. Inside, he felt a strange emptiness; something, obviously, was missing, but he couldn’t say what. Then he felt a gnawing inside and tried to put a name to it. Eventually it came to him: hunger. He felt hungry.

  He put his hand in his pocket and felt around. What for? Ah yes, money, that was it, money that came in coins and notes. But his pockets were empty, not only those of his trousers but of his jacket too. Not only was there no money in them, but there was nothing else either. There was no wallet, no letter, no document that could have given him a clue as to who he was or why he was where he was. He was a man who had been cut loose from life, like an empty boat that had slipped its moorings.

  He continued on his way, if a random peregrination can be called a way. Although the world was entirely new to him, he soon grew bored with it. The shops began to repeat themselves; very rarely now was there a type that he had not passed a little earlier in the day. What is more, that gnawing sensation, that at first had been faint, was becoming insistent and kept on growing in intensity. He had to do something to assuage it.

  But what? He knew that stealing was wrong, but this knowledge puzzled him: if he did not know who or where he was, how could he know that stealing was wrong and, moreover, likely to get him into trouble?

  He saw an arrow-shaped sign on a lamp-post consisting of a single white letter on a blue background: H. Somewhere in the recess of that vacuum, his mind, situated almost physically at the back of skull, this single letter stirred an unformed thought that acted like a burrowing insect in his brain. He stopped for a moment and stood still. H, what did H mean? He decided that he wouldn’t move on until he had remembered, even if by standing there he drew attention to himself.

  How does one drag things into consciousness? No one knows, of course, but suddenly the man had a flash of inspiration. Hospital, that was what H stood for. Anyone who was observing him closely would have noticed a slight widening of his eyes as he received this illumination; but no one was observing him closely. Why should they
have been?

  At last he had a goal to pursue, a direction to follow. He bent his steps in the direction indicated by the arrow. Before long, looming over the late Regency or early-Victorian terraces of which the area mainly consisted, there was a vast, grey concrete edifice of many floors and dull, dirty and mean-looking windows. It was the hospital. Another sign caught his attention: Accident and Emergency.

  There was a long ramp where the ambulances arrived and an automatic door that opened with a rattle and a shudder when anyone approached it. On the ground outside was a crunchy carpet of discarded cigarette ends. ‘Do I smoke?’ wondered the man. He didn’t know the answer.

  He entered the building and not far inside was a counter with several women sitting behind it. Above them was a green sign with the word ‘Reception’. The man approached the counter and, because it was not a busy time of day, there was no one in front of him. Nevertheless, the woman behind the counter immediately before him looked from her computer screen to the papers beside it, and back again, so that she did not notice, or at least attend to, him. He cleared his throat to draw her attention to his presence.

  She looked up.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  The man didn’t know what to say. He had expected her to take the initiative.

  She looked him up and down. He didn’t look injured or even ill to her, and though not qualified in anything except paperwork, her experience had lent her a certain medical shrewdness, at least in her own opinion.

  ‘What do you want?’ She made it sound more like an accusation than a question, as if his object in being there were to waste her time.

  ‘I need help,’ said the man before her.

  ‘What with?’ asked the woman, disbelievingly.

  The man realised that he could hardly say that he was hungry and penniless.

  ‘I don’t know who I am,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t do psychotherapy here,’ said the woman. ‘This is accident and emergency.’

  But in fact, much to her chagrin, she was not allowed to turn anyone away. It was this powerlessness, this lack of discretion, that provoked her asperity. When you have no choice but to give people what they want, you delight to deny it them as long as possible. In the circumstances, rudeness is self-respect.