by John Bowen
*
The two rooms and the hallway of Charles’ basement made up the width of a very thin house in a whole row of thin houses jammed together. The front room held the bed and the bookcase, a porcelain wash basin, a table, a telephone, three straight chairs, two armchairs, a carpet and a gas fire. The carpet was worn in several places, and kept only moderately free from dust by the daily who came once a week. The mirror over the mantel had brown stains on it. One of the armchairs was covered with dirty chintz, the other with hessian. The net curtain over the window had faded to the colour of old teeth; the thicker inner blackout curtain would never quite close. The windows were streaked with dirt, because Charles would neither clean them himself nor have them cleaned; he and his landlady disagreed over responsibility for the windows. The gas meter was adapted to take either shillings or sixpences, and ate both at a great rate. During the winter, Charles would plot and scheme in shops and buses to get these coins in change. It never occurred to him to buy them in bulk from a bank.
The back room of the basement held the bath and a gas stove. The bath was filled by a geyser, and had a wooden cover. When this cover was in place, it was used as a kitchen table, and Charles did the washing-up on it in a chipped enamel bowl. Every evening on his return from work, he would find the accumulated washing-up of breakfast and the evening before piled on top of the bath, and, as he opened the door, he would smell the smells of old cooking. There was linoleum instead of carpet on the floor of this room, and the window was uncurtained. Charles manic would dry himself in front of the window after his bath; Charles depressive sat in the bath itself until the last drop of water had run out, his back bent, his head drooping, and used the towel where he was.
The rest of Charles’ flat was all hallway, except that at the end of the hall was a w.c, tucked in under the stair that led to the floors above. It was a very small w.c, and he had to get right into it before he could close the door. A further door led to the area at the back of the house where the dustbins were kept. Since Charles often forgot to lock this door, he was sometimes surprised by Sybil, the landlady, on her way back upstairs from emptying her little polythene trash can. “Don’t mind me,” she would cry as Charles crouched there in embarrassment, or sometimes, “Will you be long?” and Charles would not dare to come out again until he was sure she was nowhere about. The w.c. was unlighted, and a torch was always kept by the roll of Andrex at the back of the wide wooden seat.
For this basement, Charles paid three and a half guineas a week in cash to Sybil, who lived on the first floor. On the ground floor, a cook and a window-dresser lived together, and paid five guineas, partly, as Sybil explained in a moment of frankness, because it was nicer, and partly it wasn’t easy for them to find anywhere else, poor dears, though thank God she was broadminded. The top floor held a very old couple, who were husband and wife. Theirs was an unfurnished tenancy, and even after the Rent Act, Sybil had been unable to raise their rent to more than two pounds a week; after all, if things came to a Tribunal, the Income Tax might get nosey about the other tenants. Every time he went upstairs at the weekend to pay his rent, Charles found Sybil ready to discuss some new plan to dispossess this couple, whom she had inherited with the house. She both looked forward to their death and was terrified of their dying; whenever she thought that she had seen nothing of them for some time, she would tiptoe upstairs to listen at their door.
Sybil was a character; it was tiresome for Charles. Reading Twelfth Might at school, he had wondered what a “day bed” was. Now he knew that a day bed was only a night bed that you didn’t bother to remake, but just stayed in all day with the telly on. Sybil had been in repertory in Rochester, but the gin had rotted her. For five years now she had done nothing professionally, but occasional small parts in the various radio and television serials. The fees for these appearances did not even pay for her drink. “I live off my lodgers,” she would say. “My God! What a bloody come-down, I mean, really.”
When Charles reached home on this evening, she was waiting for him as she sometimes did, sitting alone in the shabby chintz-covered chair with a bottle of gin on the table by her side. Sybil never made these visits without the excuse of a situation; sometimes, she said, she just had to let her hair down or die. Usually it would be about a job. Did Charles think she ought to go to work in a coffee bar?—start a rather select fish-and-chip shop (“more halibut, dear, than cod”) near Belgrave Square? —sell dirty books for a rather disgusting man near the Charing Cross Road? About all these and her other problems, she was always ready to take down her hair, although sometimes, if she were having one of her slatternly days, the hair would be down already, one braid swinging insecurely at her shoulders, the other still half pinned.
This was not one of those days. Sybil had been out for the afternoon “dropping in on old chums”, and was a Knightsbridge Sybil, her face most carefully pancaked, her hair coiffed and shining. She had come straight in to Charles’ room from the off-licence at the corner, and still wore her two-piece and a cone-shaped hat of white fluff. When Charles arrived, she sent him out for tonic water, so that they could really enjoy a cosy chat without having to get up again.
“Charles dear, you know how clever you are,” she said. “You must help me. I’m distraught.” This told Charles at once what they were to talk about. Sybil was only distraught when Herbert, her lover, an unemployed bald South African, was in trouble. Except that he was thinner, Herbert looked very like the conventional conception of a sugar-daddy, but since he never had any sugar to speak of, he had to get it from Sybil, who had little enough of her own.
“Herbert?” Charles said.
“How did you guess? It’s so shaming. He’s been had up.”
“Arrested?”
“More or less. Have another drink, dear; you look tired, I must say. I don’t know how you manage it going to that dreary old office every day. I should die.”
“A lot of people do go to offices every day,” Charles said. “They don’t all die. Not until it’s time.”
“It couldn’t come soon enough. Living those awful grey lives, I mean, really.”
“What’s Herbert been arrested for?”
“Well, he hasn’t actually been arrested, poor lamb— more sort of summonsed really. It was the car. It broke down, dear. Well, I mean he hit something. Just a scraze. I’m sure it wasn’t Herbert’s fault. He’s a terribly careful driver. I mean, you know how he won’t even step into the car if he’s had a couple. You remember that awful time when mummy was here?”
Charles remembered that awful time. Herbert couldn’t stay the night with Sybil because mummy was there—they could hardly have slept three in a bed—and he wouldn’t drive because he’d had a couple. It was snowing. Herbert had decided to sleep in the back seat of the car. Sybil had asked Charles for help (“Charles, I’m distraught!”), and he had spent half an hour, standing in the snow, wearing only pyjamas, a dressing-gown and sandals without toes, until he had managed to coax Herbert indoors to spend the night in a chair. “Yes, I remember,” he said.
“Of course you do. You were so sweet. Drink up, dear; you must have another. Well, you do see what I mean, don’t you? I mean he is such a careful driver. Only when the police came along, his licence had expired, and then the insurance wasn’t paid, because after all you can’t expect Herbert to keep up with that sort of thing, because he is so broke.”
Charles had another drink. “You know, Sybil, there was something I had to do,” he began, but of course it was no good. There was no way of getting rid of Sybil until the bottle was empty and her hair completely down. He asked whether Herbert had any friends with legal training (“Of course he has. He’s got hundreds of friends, not that they ever do anything for him.”) and suggested that perhaps he’d better consult one of them. (“You’re always so helpful, dear. I should never have thought of that.”) His head ached. He wished Sybil would go away. The level of the gin sank in the bottle. Sybil sent him out for more tonic, and as he pai
d for it in the off-licence he wondered whether it wouldn’t be easier not to go back to his flat at all, but to catch a bus somewhere to the centre of London, and stay out for the rest of the evening. There was something he had planned to do. He knew what it was, and played with the idea, keeping it like a treasured sweet at the back of his mind as he walked back with the tonic—very carefully so as not to fall apart, and let his intention out. Sybil poured him another drink, and herself another drink, and another, and another. With each drink, Charles increased his control over himself. If he were to relax, he knew, the pieces of his head would fall outwards like the staves of a barrel. Yet if he made it tighter, he might crack up the middle. He felt like china in a vice. Sybil would stay, taking down her bloody hair until the bottle was empty. Ergo, he would empty it—but he was drinking on an empty stomach, and would be sick. He had another, but decided to drink it slowly. Sybil said, “Here I go, talking about myself again, when, let’s face it, I do lead the most bloody uninteresting life. So I’m going to sit here quite still like a little mouse, and you’re going to tell me all about yourself for a change.” Gazing through the bottom of his glass to a room as round as a goldfish bowl, he suddenly made a discovery, and began to giggle. “Shall I tell you a terribly funny thing?” he said. “Apart from my editor and his secretary, you’re the first person who’s spoken to me for three days.”
“What’s so funny about that?”
“No. There was the man on the bus. He said, ‘Fares, please’.”
“What’s so funny?”
“I don’t know. I just thought it was terribly funny.”
But Sybil was shocked. She knew what was what. She was an actress and a lady. and she knew what response to make to any situation. She could not see that this was funny at all. Charles stopped laughing. Was she angry with him? Did she dislike him? Would she give him notice? There was a silence. Then Sybil said, “Well, I can’t hang around here all night anyway,” and, taking the almost empty bottle with her, left him alone in the dusk.
Charles’ head felt strange. Now he must pull himself together. He must wash up. He must make himself a cup of tea, and heat a tin of beans or something. He must decide what to do this evening. “I won’t go to the pictures anyway,” he said aloud, listened, realized that he was talking to himself, and added in bravado, “First sign of madness”. He switched on the radio. “Won’t go for a walk either,” he said. Not down Holland Park Avenue to Shepherd’s Bush and back. Not along the Bayswater Road and into Kensington Gardens, past the rows of men in macintoshes sitting vacantly on wooden benches. Not down Kensington Church Street, staring into the windows of antique shops, along Kensington High Street, and back through Holland Park. (Once, as he stood outside an antique shop, a passing stranger had stopped, pointed to the silver collar on a decanter, and said, “My friend used to wear one of those as a bracelet.”) “Won’t go to the local,” Charles said, “Won’t read a book”. The radio burped, and an announcer began to read the nine o’clock news. Charles switched it off. “So much for you,” he said. Then he said, “Want to go to sleep. Want to go to sleep, and never wake up,” and he remembered what it was he had planned to do this evening.
Of course it was ridiculous. Of course he wouldn’t do it. Anyway, he didn’t know what would happen. It wasn’t like the gas. He had heard that if you tried to gas yourself, the carbon dioxide paralyzed your motor reactions before you yourself became unconscious, so that you could lie there wanting desperately to turn it off or open a window or something, but unable to do anything about it. Charles wouldn’t care for that. Pills were the thing, although of course one didn’t know what effect these pills would have.
Charles suffered from a mild hay fever during May and June. There were white pills to take by day, pink pills before going to bed at night. The pink pills made him feel drowsy. Therefore, he thought, they were only to make him sleep. Once he had taken two instead of the one prescribed, and had woken up next morning feeling blurry. What could be in them then but a barbiturate? If he were to take more than two—if he were to take the lot…. He fetched the pills from the drawer of his bedside table, opened the little round box, and tipped them into the palm of his hand. There were eleven. If he wanted to, he could take eleven.
There they were, pink against the pinky brown of his palm. They looked like toys, and seemed to have no weight. He would not take them all. There was no question of that. Thinking about a thing and doing it were two very different matters. But if he were to take—just two, say—it would kill the evening and the night, and nobody could object to that. To kill the evening—not to be bored, not to be by himself, not to be conscious, not to be alive——No, that was false reasoning; not to be alive for a while, but to wake up later to a new day, the possibility of some new happening, the possibility of discovering, of just simply knowing what on earth was the point of it all, and why people bothered. He took one of the pills and then another, washing them down with tonic water. Then temptation came. It came as curiosity. Temptation—nothing to do with the lusts of the flesh, just wanting to know, wanting to know what would happen it you took a bite out of that bloody apple, if you swallowed another pill. He put another of the pills on his tongue, and cradled it there on the tip. Then he bit into it. It tasted rather nasty; no wonder they covered them with pink stuff. He drank some more tonic, and took a fourth pill. This was ridiculous. Dangerous. Furtive—a kind of self-abuse in a darkened room. Anyway, the damage was done. After four pills, he’d be very ill indeed, and never able to explain it away. No explanations. Suddenly he crammed all the last seven pills into his mouth at once, swallowing them with difficulty, and feeling each one as a separate bump in his gullet. Then he took his coat and shoes off, lay down on the bed, and fell almost instantly asleep. When he awoke, he was in hospital.
*
The long wards were set off at right angles to the hospital corridors, so many feet between each ward. Within the wards the beds faced each other, ranged at right angles to the side walls, so many feet between each bed. The walls were painted white in glossy paint (which reflects the light), and large windows were set in them, so many feet between each window. Each bed within each ward was of the same length, just too short for an unusually tall man. Above each bed was its own reading light, to the right its own locker, resting on each locker, its own pair of earphones, all of them tuned in at the same time to the same programme of the B.B.C., which was sometimes the Home, usually the Light, but never the Third. Each bed had an iron framework painted black, and red blankets, and white sheets. Each had one chair beside it for the use of visitors, who were allowed into the ward during Visiting Hours at the rate of not more than two visitors for each patient. Extra chairs might be brought from the centre of the ward, where they were set symmetrically around the wooden table which always stood there.
In the ceiling of each ward was a pattern of curtain rails made of polished brass. These allowed the hospital staff to isolate any bed from its fellows by drawing round it a curtain of coarse red cloth. By day such isolation would be complete, but at night, when all the individual reading lights had been switched off and the B.B.C. was silent, a light within the red curtains would allow the wakeful patients of the ward to see in silhouette all that went on inside. It was like the sort of comic turn that Boy Scouts perform at village concerts, when a shadow surge on removes from the belly of a shadow patient such incongruous articles as hacksaws, bicycle chains and long strings of sausages. On his first night in hospital, Charles himself watched such a performance. He watched a man die.
Sharp-eyed in the dark, the watching patients saw a shadow priest administer a shadow sacrament, while the dying man lay passively on the bed, and the priest leaned over him to catch the last confession of some shadow sin. They watched the shadow nurse sit by his side reading Picturegoer, and the slow occasional stirrings of the man in the bed, made only, it seemed, as if to show that life was not done yet, not quite done, not until at last the man jerked upwards a little, and bu
bbled, and snored, and stopped, and was gone for ever, leaving only his body on the bed. Then they watched the departure of the shadow nurse to report, and waited out the hour that went by before the dead man could indeed be treated as dead. All the deft routine of laying-out, they watched in shadow-play. They saw the shadow nurse shave the dead body, dab wet swabs on its eyes, strip it, fold its hands neatly beneath its buttocks, tie its toes together, slip a bandage beneath its chin so that it should not stiffen grotesquely awry, and finally ease it into its shroud. Then she let the bib of the shroud fall over the body’s face, and made all safe with cotton, biting the thread when the task was done. She summoned the porters. Soundlessly on rubber wheels the trolley was brought to the bedside, and the corpse transferred to it to be taken off to the hospital mortuary. Only then was the light switched off, and the performance over.
“Will you take note of that now?” said the Irishman in the next bed. “They’ll have someone else in it when we wake in the morning.”
But in the morning the bed was empty and freshly made, and it was not reoccupied until midday.
*
“Well,” the doctor said, “what the hell did you think you were doing?”
When Charles did not reply, the doctor sat down on the chair next to the bed, and motioned to Sister that she might leave them together. She nodded, and went swiftly through the swing doors at the end of the ward. “She disapproves of psychiatrists,” the doctor said. “You can’t blame her really. I disapprove of them myself. We’re not much more than a sort of confidence trick really. Still, a man must live.”