The Age of Anxiety

by Pete Townshend

  She mentioned another link. “Louis Doxtader,” she added. “Your godfather, I think, is my husband’s agent. What an extraordinary coincidence.”

  Walter nodded, and I turned my face away, hoping she wouldn’t recognize me and slow down our progress to Floss any further. Coincidences often happen in hospitals, which gather people up like railway stations and airports. We tend to run into old acquaintances in such places.

  Maud was not so commonsensical. “No,” she corrected herself. “This is not a mere coincidence. It’s meant to be. It’s like a circle, and it’s closing. How wonderful. I’m Maud, by the way.”

  I could maintain my distance no longer. “Hello, Maud,” I said, offering my hand. “I’ve brought Walter here to see his wife.”

  Maud held out both hands and we each took one.

  Then, suddenly looking her age, she broke down in tears. Walter moved to comfort her and hardly heard her confession as she fell into his arms and sobbed.

  “I had his child,” she wept. “He never knew.”

  Walter seemed not to register what she was saying. Probably all he could think of was Floss in a coma, after a stroke, perhaps disabled for life, having lost a child.

  Walter allowed Maud to pull away from his arms slowly.

  She looked to the floor.

  “My husband,” she said, “is behaving absurdly. Wickedly, though he can’t help himself. He’s fallen in love with the young woman in the bed opposite his own. He’s refusing to die. It’s stubbornness.”

  Maud turned her gaze on Walter.

  “It’s so unfair,” she complained, wiping her eyes. “I’ve suffered with Nik for so long. I’ve put up with his crazy visions and his dangerous adventures. Now I can’t even watch him die with any dignity. Floss! What kind of a name is that?”

  I watched as Walter gazed through the window of the locked door into the critical care ward and gasped with amazement. What we both saw was especially pleasing after Maud’s rant. Like most people, we thought the National Health Service had been in decline, and that this hospital in particular had suffered from lack of funds. However, the entire ward was modern, shining, and bustling with dozens of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and cleaners. Typically, there was no one at the reception desk outside the locked door, but people were going in and out using swipe cards, and we walked in with one of them who directed us toward a second reception desk inside the ward. That was unattended too. Everyone seemed to be busy.

  Lots of staff were moving around purposefully, none of them giving us a second glance. We had no idea which way to turn, right or left. There was a central corridor with about six small wards branching off it, and a few isolation rooms with glass walls. Neither of us had ever experienced such a sense of positive activity in a hospital before. The last time I’d been in a hospital was to visit a friend who had had a knee operation and wanted to smoke a cigarette. We had had to go to a bleak, seedy area set aside for the purpose. It had been an unpleasant experience. But now Walter and I knew that we were looking at the very hub of this hospital, served by powerfully equipped operating rooms. The ordinary part of the hospital was probably much less impressive, and less intense. But this was all reassuring.

  Suddenly, Walter seemed to stagger, losing his balance. I held his arm and steadied him.

  He looked at me gratefully. His dizziness was caused not so much by panic as by relief. Floss could not be in a better place, whatever Maud Andréevich believed was so evil about mixed wards.

  Just then Walter spied Maud at the end of the corridor, walking out of one of the side wards holding some towels. He went toward where he had seen her emerge. How would Floss be?

  We reached the ward. There were six beds, five with occupants.

  Floss was not there.

  Walter had been certain that this was where he would find her, since Maud had said that Floss was in the bed opposite Old Nik’s. And there he was, wearing a pair of large headphones, sitting on the side of his bed, listening to something, rocking back and forth. It was shocking to see how much he had deteriorated. He was covered in dark chocolate-colored lesions all over his face and hands, and his teeth were black. Walter looked at the bed opposite and checked the chart.

  Florence Watts. This is where she should be. Was she dead? Oh God. In surgery?

  At that moment Nik Andréevich looked up and saw Walter’s face. The old man’s eyes were full of tears. He looked at Walter and slipped off the earphones. Walter could hear the music, an old New Orleans funeral anthem.

  I went down to the St. James Infirmary, and I saw my baby there. She was stretched out on a long white table, so cold, and fine, and bare. Let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever she may be. She can search this world over, never find another man like me. When I die, oh Lord, please bury me in my high-top Stetson hat. Put gold coins over my eyelids, so the boys will know I died standing pat. Get six crap-shooting pallbearers, six chorus girls to sing me a song. Put a jazz band behind my hearse to raise hell as we roll along. Get sixteen coal-black horses, to pull that rubber-tired hack. There’re thirteen men going to the graveyard, only twelve are coming back. Suddenly, the music leaps up a hundred notches, a full classical orchestra follows the rhythm of a huge orchestral bass drum, booming slowly and funereally. Let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever she may be. She can search this world over, never find another man like me. With every repeat of the two lines the singers become more celebratory. The lead male voice becomes more and more arrogant and bragging, more grandiose, more self-assured. Soon there are thousands of them. A massive choir, straight out of Mahler. A huge organ. The music shakes the world. An old man laughs. A young girl sings, upward, away.

  Walter looked like he was stifling bile; the old man must have been staying alive by the skin of his teeth. But his sunken eyes were alight with something that was tricky to place at first. I was standing at a distance, but Walter told me later that at that instant he realized what he could see in the old man’s eyes.

  Lust.

  Walter called to a nurse who was passing through the ward.

  “My wife, Florence Watts, where is she?” His voice wavered with anxiety and concern.

  “She’s in that bed there, Mr. Watts,” said the nurse. “She’s in the bathroom at the moment.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “As well as can be expected after such a fall.” The nurse uttered the well-worn hospital cliché as she guided Walter to a chair next to Floss’s empty bed.

  “I understand my wife had a stroke of some kind?”

  “I believe it was quite a minor one.” The nurse made to walk away but then turned back to face Walter. “The surgeon will explain, but she is having trouble with her balance at the moment, and that may go on for a while. She was a keen rider, I understand?”

  “She is a professional horsewoman,” corrected Walter, who never knew quite how to describe Floss’s job.

  “She may not be able to ride again,” said the nurse rather curtly. “But she is quite well. You’ll see.”

  Walter shuddered and I knew he must be wondering whether Floss herself knew that she might never be able to ride her favorite horse, Dragon, again.

  “There was a baby, I believe,” Walter mumbled. “My wife, will she…” He couldn’t complete the sentence, but the nurse understood.

  “She’s a healthy young woman. We shall see. It’s looking good.” She smiled.

  Then she was gone, walking away so quietly and quickly that Walter hardly seemed to notice her disappear. He slumped into the chair by the empty bed. I know he had never thought much about children before. Floss had never seemed to bother about starting a family; she had always been happy with her horses. Now there was a miscarried child. What would their life have been like had the baby survived? Then I saw him look over at Old Nik, who was glaring at him. It was obvious he didn’t remember Walter.

  “You,” he growled. “Young fellah!”

  The old man was calling him over to his bed. Wal
ter went to his side. Nik was whispering. As Walter lowered his head he must have smelled the combined fetid odors of tumors and morphine. The old man grabbed his arm, then suddenly gasped and fell back on his pillow, asleep again.

  Chapter 19

  Suddenly, there she stood beside him.

  Floss. Leaning on a walker, with a drip taped to her left arm, the plastic bag hanging from a stand on casters so that she had to walk in short stages—carefully and tenderly, in great pain, still feeling dizzy.

  Walter looked at her; I could see what my godson must have been thinking. She was so beautiful. His wife had always glowed; she was a “shining girl,” literally speaking. A strand of blond hair fell over one side of her face, and the white nightie she wore was crumpled. Over it she had on an open blue linen dressing gown that set off a sparkle in her blue eyes. A dark purple-blue bruise on her right temple extended down to her cheekbone. She had recently put on some bright red lipstick, perhaps to cheer herself up, so Walter was confronted with a strange blaze of mixed hues: yellow, blue, purple, and red. Floss smiled, beaming at him.

  “Floss!” Walter almost shouted her name.

  At this, Old Nik in the opposite bed woke up and was pumping at his morphine line.

  “Floss,” he exclaimed triumphantly. “That was her name. I think. I do think.” Nik was starting to yell.

  Oh fuck, I thought. It was clear from his expression that Walter really didn’t like the old man using his wife’s nickname.

  “Her name is Florence,” he corrected.

  Maud ran into the room to Nik’s bed and tried to calm him, looking at Floss and Walter reproachfully. But Old Nik carried on, in a reverie of memory, or perhaps fantasy.

  “Florence! Flo! Flossie! Floss!” He was laughing now as he tried out all the variations of her name. “I used to walk you to school!”

  He was trying to rise from his bed, his face pale, drained of blood, taking on a slightly green pallor.

  He started to sing wildly. Then fell back.

  Walter took Floss in his arms as best he could and led her to her bed, where she sat, grateful.

  Nik was still raising hell, and Maud looked over again.

  Suddenly, her mood changed. It was almost as though she relented, accepting Nik’s delusions. But also, at last, she was able to make the connection between Floss, Walter, and me. The pieces were falling together, and she began to see that meeting Walter in the hospital reception area was in fact a much larger and happier coincidence than she had thought. Floss was not the enemy.

  She smiled.

  Floss smiled back.

  Old Nik slumped briefly, appearing to be unconscious for a moment, but then recovered. He reached out, arms outstretched, to Floss in the opposite bed, while Maud tried to restrain the absurdly lustful old man.

  His wild eyes moved from Floss to Maud, back and forth.

  “Too old to live, too dead to love,” the old man was almost singing now. “Both you women…”

  He paused for a moment as if in revelation.

  “Both you women are the same.”

  Nik’s heart monitor alarm emitted a continuous sound—his heart had stopped. He slumped back, his mouth open, his eyes tightly closed. Maud threw herself onto the old man’s body and held him. She did not weep, nor cry out.

  Walter looked as though he might shout for help, make some kind of fuss; maybe shout “Cart!” as we had seen on hospital television series. But before he could do anything the nurse was there and pulled the curtains quickly around the bed.

  We could hear Maud speaking to her dead husband, asking him a final question as he ascended from this life to the next.

  “You said you loved her,” she said. “Who is she? Who was she to you? Who does she remind you of? You swore to me there had been no one. You swore!”

  Obviously uncomfortable to be hearing this, Walter held Floss tightly.

  “Poor, poor you!” He was ashamed at how badly he had behaved, how long he had delayed rushing to her side. “Do you feel OK? Will you be OK? Was the journey here terrible? I’m so, so sorry it took me so long to get here to be with you. I feel like a complete cunt… This is all very strange—with Maud and Nik.”

  Floss looked up at him and shook her head.

  Walter whispered to her. “The old man had obviously fallen in love with you,” he said. “Maud was right—he was hanging on to life, refusing to die, almost as if he saw in you someone he had once loved.”

  Floss clutched at Walter. This was not her fault, and not a drama she wanted any part of, but Walter was carried away by the unfolding story.

  “Maybe you reminded him of someone he had loved before Maud? Or someone he’d had an affair with?” This was clearly what Maud believed. “Someone called Florence? Could that be why she’s so angry with you?”

  When Walter looked back to Floss, still enfolded in his arms, he saw that he had been insensitive again. She was shaking her head and weeping. He smiled and moved so he could look at her face.

  “Maud was angry before I arrived,” corrected Floss, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “The old bugger would simply not give up. He wouldn’t let go and die. He was in terrible pain. It was awful for Maud. He set eyes on me and seemed to make me the reason to fight back. It wasn’t fair to her. He didn’t seem to see Maud anymore, only me. A couple of times he came round from a stupor claiming he’d been halfway down a long white tunnel. He knew he’d been dying, on the last stretch. He said he’d fought his way back into his diseased and painful body merely for one last look at me. What an awful honor for me!”

  Walter couldn’t help but laugh, but he stifled it quickly. There was nothing funny about what had happened, and it seemed like the most extraordinary tragedy for Maud. But of course he knew exactly what Nik had seen in his beautiful, shining Floss. She had illuminated his final days.

  “He kept shouting that he had to see my face again,” said Floss. She was starting to cry again. “My beautiful face; the diamond in my tooth.” She put her hand up to the awful bruise that temporarily disfigured her.

  “Nik loved you,” said Walter. “It was the way he wanted to go. In love with my beautiful Floss.”

  “Maybe he just loved life and didn’t want to die!” Floss shook her hair, reviving at last.

  Maud sat quietly beside Andréevich’s lifeless body. She had stopped asking him questions now; she would never get answers. She could hear Floss and Walter whispering in the opposite bed and guessed they were talking about her husband and his deathbed obsession with Floss, but she didn’t care anymore. Soon they would cover his face and wheel him away. What would she do then? Where would she go?

  As Walter passed his wife some tea, his eyes dropped for a moment, and she could see he was ashamed of something; she suppressed a laugh.

  “I know that Selena will always be in love with you, Walt,” she said. Her hand on his arm seemed enormously significant to him in that instant. “We’ve been friends for a long time. I know her like a sister. For years we pretended to be twins. Selena says we really are twins, in a spiritual sense. You know what she’s like. I forgive her, whatever she’s said or done. I love her, Walt. I want you to love her too.”

  Walter turned to face her and wanted to speak, but Floss put her hands to his lips.

  “I can guess what she has been saying.” Floss was smiling. “Ronnie really is gay. When we were kids and even teenagers, he couldn’t really decide. But nowadays he does not ‘do’ women. Never, not at all. He flirts, but that’s all.”

  Walter shook his head and pretended not to understand, but Floss went on, explaining what had happened.

  “I collapsed in the shower in the box.” She meant the horsebox. “I’d fallen from Dragon earlier in the day. I began to lose the baby and there was some blood. Ronnie came to help me and he was so frightened. Neither of us knew what to do.”

  Walter’s face was pale; he didn’t know where to look or what to say.

  “What did Selena tell you, Walt?” Floss p
ressed her husband’s arm and squeezed it tightly; she could see suddenly that he was hiding something.

  “She told me that you and Ronnie were in the shower together.”

  At this Floss almost burst out laughing. “The shower in the box is too small for one person let alone two! If I drop the soap it’s too narrow for me to bend down and pick it up.”

  Walter smiled; he’d forgotten that.

  “She said you two have been lovers for years,” he whispered. Suddenly he felt ashamed that he could ever have believed it. “That’s why I delayed coming here for so long. I’m so sorry.”

  He could not tell her yet that he had been to see Siobhan, nor that he had slept with Selena, but instinctively he felt she knew.

  Floss kissed him and smiled.

  “Selena really does live in a world full of angels.”

  “Like Old Nik,” said Walter.

  “But she smokes too much grass, does too much coke, and tends to gild the lily,” corrected Floss, giggling.

  At that moment Floss’s parents hurried into the ward. They had been on vacation in some distant place, and had great difficulty getting home. Walter got up, hugged them both, and made way for them to move to Floss’s bedside to kiss their daughter.

  Albert and Katharine Spritzler were in their middle sixties. Albert was, I knew, Austrian, a relatively wealthy maxillofacial surgeon on the verge of retirement. He had practiced at the hospital in the past and brought with him a confidence of purpose that perhaps masked his anxiety about his daughter. He had thick gray hair behind a strong hairline, and handsome features, but life had obviously exhausted him, and he looked tired; he was short but had the innate and natural dignity of a surgeon. Katharine was also fairly small, an English woman who in her youth would have been described as a “rose.” Her once blond hair was now gray, and she wore a fitted gray coat belted at the waist and brown leather buckled shoes. Her eyes were already brimming with tears, but she was smiling. It didn’t seem forced: she was, I realized, one of those people who simply smile all the time.