Sandel

by Angus Stewart

  Chapter 18

  'Apparently you nearly died.' Lang was peering unemotionally down at the bed.

  David was laid upon his back. One of his legs was encased in plaster and raised above him as if determined to take a gigantic step up the wall. Over his head was a series of blocks and tackle more appropriate to the Pool of London than the hospital ward in which he supposed he must be lying.

  'After deliberation,' Lang went on. 'I've come to the conclusion that it's a pity you didn't.' He had sat down on the edge of the bed and was subjecting the dock equipment to a professional scrutiny. David's head appeared to have achieved a state of weightlessness and a tendency to float off the pillow.

  'How's that?'

  Lang met his eyes and smiled. 'David, you're now a member of the Roman Catholic Church.'

  'I'm what?'

  'You came over. In delirium, of course. But the faith and the will were there and, well, in such extreme circumstances that is enough.

  David made to speak, but Lang raised an imperious hand.

  'Had you died, I'm confident that all would have been well, but now,' he indicated David, 'we have to deal with a new resistance — to say nothing of the accumulation of sin since what we had supposed the final absolution. It's going to be tricky,' Lang added thoughtfully. 'The restoration of a salvaged wreck.' He curiously adjusted the salvage equipment above David's bed, and the plaster leg rose helplessly as he manipulated the wires.

  David found his voice. 'D'you honestly mean to tell me that while I lay here unconscious you had Jesuits perched on my bed with their ears clapped to my lips?'

  'More or less,' Lang confessed modestly. 'It was rather like the conversion of Wilde.'

  'Oh, Bruce!' David brought a hand up to ballast his head.

  'The fathers would be distressed if they could hear you now. Their vigil was no short one, you know.'

  'I'll bet it wasn't!'

  Lang laughed suddenly. 'The Jays were here — but of course you're not a convert really - not yet. Incidentally, you're not popular with the Society of St. John.'

  'Oh? Jays pipped them at the post for the near credit of my soul - with Benedictines running a close third? Something like that?'

  'The ambulance brigade,' Lang explained dryly. 'Apparently you rose as from the dead and laid one of them out.'

  Some memory was returning to David now. 'They tried to roll me up in a shroud. A winding-sheet - you know ...'

  'Blanket. Elementary treatment for shock.'

  'Oh.' David tried to move his body, but his waist seemed be restrained by more plaster. 'Now, supposing you tell the whole story, beginning with where I am. But first of all, it isn't Saturday yet, is it?'

  Lang was looking at him oddly. It's Thursday.'

  David looked down at his incarcerated form, and dwelt clearly upon his predicament for the first time. 'Okay. So where am I?'

  'Acland Nursing Home.'

  'And what does that little notice say?'

  Lang crossed the room and peered at the discreetly framed notice on the wall. ' "The foundation of the Acland ..." '

  'Guts, man, for God's sake!'

  Lang returned to the bedside chair, where the length of his legs reduced his posture of professional attention to absurdity. 'Twenty-four guineas a week, excluding surgery,' he announced. Despairing of dignity, he reversed the chair, straddled it, and gazed at David intently, while resting his elbows on the chair's back.

  'Where on earth am I supposed to get twenty-four guineas from?'

  'Nearer two hundred, actually.' Lang was looking puzzled again.

  David's alarm was growing. 'Now wait a minute. On whose authority was I cleaned up as a private patient? And surely a place like this doesn't take people still covered with blood ... casualties? Why wasn't I taken to the Radcliffe or somewhere?'

  'You were; initially. As to the authority which moved here, that was the college. The Senior Dean discovered you subscribed to a health assurance scheme on battels. So, when the Radcliffe intimated that they were tired of you, college had you moved here - though less I imagine from any sense that it was indecent for St. Cecilia's men, or even ex-St. Cecilia's men to die in public, than because it was the obvious thing to do.'

  David now clutched his head with both hands. It had become ludicrously articulated like Thompson's. 'Singly, Bruce! Come slowly! The Radcliffe were tired of me?'

  'Yes'

  'Now ex-St. Cecilia's men?'

  Lang's perplexity had become a frown. 'You mean you don't know that they sent you down?'

  'You're the first visitor I've consciously received, man, damn it!' The day of awakening was proving something of a trial.

  Lang had risen in confusion. 'David! I had no idea ... they told me you'd been conscious for several days ...'

  'On and off. I remember now. A doctor and a nurse, I think. All internals, though.'

  Lang began to mumble something, but David cut him short.

  'You couldn't have known. Of course, I knew all along that racing cars is against Proctorial Regulations. But we're not quite through.'

  'How,' Lang looked up.

  'Since when has your intended profession taken to moving patients around whilst in a coma, and within days of a major accident? And what about that two hundred quid? Did the ambulance man claim damages - or have I undergone a little surgery on the local private table?' As he spoke, David gestured towards the notice on the Wall.

  Lang, who seemed to have regained his customary composure, promptly lost it again. A frown furrowed his brow like the work of a drunken ploughman. He started to take a copy of The Times out of the pocket of his hairy sports jacket, then apparently thought better of it.

  'David, I told you a moment ago that it was Thursday, and it is. But it is Thursday the first of September. You've been unconscious for just over ten weeks.' Lang, who had been looking at him steadily while he made this announcement, now handed him the paper.

  David took it, but laid it down without looking at it. His body had gone strangely cold. Gooseflesh had colonised his neck, and was making inroads behind his ears and along his cheek-bones. When he moistened his lips they felt like Ozymandias' stones in the desert.

  'I promised to meet Tony. On the fence where we often met. He must have sat there waiting ... and I didn't come ... '

  'You look well enough,' Lang pronounced: he had taken turn about the room. But if I don't go soon they'll as like as not throw me out and prefer manslaughter. I only got in anyway because the house surgeon is one of our part-time instructors. You're supposed to he resting'

  David didn't smile. 'Your visit has proved bloody salubrious so far. Just supposing you go off and persuade someone to produce one of those wandering telephones. A place like this must have sockets in every room'

  Lang was holding up his hand. It was that empirical gesture of his that commanded mute attention. One day it must be enlisted to help open graves. Now he merely said, 'News! As regards that wretched small boy, I collected a number of letters from your pigeon-hole in the J.C.R. which I imagine are his. At least, the handwriting has a spidery quality and tendency to protract itself diagonally across the face of the envelope in a manner that suggests it could only be that of a choirboy. The characters appear microscopic or ballooned, and the script, in a word, might be said to mince over the paper. Further,' Lang continued reminiscently. 'I couldn't help remarking that the postcard - there is one - carries a superfluous capital X and a zero, while the illustration strikes me as being a strange choice for a child.'

  While Lang unwound himself, David had stretched a hand out of the bed. 'You seem to have scrutinised my post with the eye of a lover yourself.'

  'My devotion to it didn't end there, I assure you!' Lang produced a large envelope from his breast pocket. 'I sealed them in here, so that they might be preserved from thoughtless abuses such as bending, atmospheric pollution and so on. Also,' Lang fished in another pocket and produced a card of ribbon, 'I bought this after some consultation with a youn
g woman in Woolworths who assured me that pink would be "nicest" for the purpose.'

  David's outstretched hand had become inanimate during this pantomime. Now it was allowed to close on Tony's letters. He drew the fathom of pins and needles back to the bed.

  'Tongue, please,' Lang said curtly.

  'What?'

  'Put out your tongue!'

  David put out his tongue.

  'Mmmm!' Lang shook his head. 'You know, you haven't smoked for ten weeks yet your tongue still looks like a door-mat. Makes you think doesn't it? All right, I'll see what can be done about a telephone, though probably my name will be struck off the medical register before it's even on it as a result.'

  'It will be anyway if you insult your patients' tongues ... Always stop at the "Mmmm!", and don't hazard matey remarks.'

  Lang looked at the envelope, which David had made no move to open. 'I'm going to wander round the lawn. Only don't take wing like a Tinkerbell. I don't want to have to come hunting for you in Kensington Gardens or wherever that fragile correspondence comes from.'

  Chapter 19

  When Lang had gone David considered the envelope, and then looked about him in the small room. He had no previous memory of it, and so presumably he had become fully conscious for the first time that day. It was strange there had been no medical interruptions while Lang had been with him - no beating of tambourines, or even ritual admonitions to rest and save his strength. But then perhaps he had been coming half-heartedly to the surface for some days, and his recovery had been predictable.

  David looked again at the large envelope in his hands. His eyes strayed away from it across the cream-walled room which was quite bare save for a single, pale lily in a pewter vase, the chair on which Lang had sat, and an ill-disguised Victorian commode, whose achievement would doubtless be his sole physical ambition in the weeks that must follow. In fact the commode did literally stand in the pathway to the light, for it was placed in front of what he now saw to be a french window giving on to a series of terraced lawns. At the bottom of the garden was an oak whose bearing only mocked the subservience of his own absurdly trapped mortality. It was four o'clock, but already late afternoon. The sunshine was thinned like a painter's sunshine: diluted with turpentine so that it flows irresistibly cold to the corners the canvas. The same chill had suffused the entire scene which the window framed. The softened, melon-flesh green of the oak leaves, and curling grey petals from the collapsed rose heads, were already allied in their gradual submission to the tonal equality of winter. For the first time the freak result of his accident was fully comprehensible to him. He had slept into the autumn.

  David turned once more to Lang's reinforced envelope, realising that he had only sought to delay the moment when Tony must leap out alive from the pages of his letters. The postcard bore the earliest date, and had been sent from Cambridge on June the 8th; the day Tony was to have played in the match against Kings. The message said simply: Naught not out! See you on Saturday. Love T. It carried in addition the symbols to which Lang had referred, while the picture was a photograph of a statue, which suggested that Tony had made, the Fitzwilliam Museum after all. Like Hamley standing up for the anthem, the statue had no arms.

  Of the further letters the first was dated June 12th, or the day after the proposed meeting by the fence. David opened it without allowing himself time for thought. Tony's voice came to him quite as clearly as he'd feared:

  Dear David,

  Did you forget on Saturday? I was there at half past two. I hope you are not ill or anything, or that you were tired of me. Anyway, I thought you must have forgotten. Then looked all along the fence in case you had left a message. I missed Evensong. There was an awful row. Mrs. Jones was wild. I said I thought I'd lost my memory like in a film I caw once. Then Mrs. Jones said: 'The child is upset, Harold', and squashed me into her bosom. Will you write soon?

  Lots of Love, Tony

  P.S. One of my fish died. I think it was the thunder.

  David passed the sleeve of his pyjamas over his face and opened the next letter mechanically. He wished to God that Lang had opened them months ago, and that the discretion that was at this moment withholding the telephone had yielded to common sense when Lang first saw the postcard. Still, he'd spun the Series 4 into that Turner's oil through his own stupidity. A careless betrayal of his academic career was one thing: a betrayal of Tony another. Desperately David looked through the french window, but there was no sign of Lang. There wasn't even a bell connected in the room, and he had nothing more substantial to throw at the window than his wrist-watch. He might as well have been in a straitjacket. The second letter was post-marked ten days later.

  Dear David,

  I haven't had a letter from you yet. I know you are ill. I hope you get better soon. But don't worry if you can't write. Can you ask someone to tell me where you are?

  I've got it in my diary that your term ends tomorrow so after practice this morning I went along the quad and rang the bell of the Master's Lodging to see if he knew where you are. I think it was a butler who came because he had a trail-coat like a conductor. It was the same man who took our caps at our party there at Christmas. He called me 'Master Sandel', and said that Sir Eustace and Lady Janet were in America. Then I said that I wanted to know where you were but that it was all rather private, and he said there was a don called Mr. Ricks, I think, who knew most about 'the young gentlemen', and would I 'be pleased to follow' him. There was a maid dusting things in the hall and the butler said, 'Smith, receive any callers whilst I escort Master Sandel across the quadrangle.' Then he led me right across the quad holding his arms stiff at his sides. 1 thought I was supposed to keep step with him like in gym but it was difficult as there was a gale blowing and my gown kept blowing up almost over my head. When we got to the don's rooms the butler said, 'Excuse me, sir, but one of the choristers, Master Antony Sandel, is anxious to determine the whereabouts of Mr. Rogers, and has called at the Master's Lodging. I thought it proper to refer Master Sandel to yourself, sir.' The don said, 'Thank you, Mekin,' and the butler went away. When he had gone the don looked at me and said, 'Extraordinary?' He was a tiny little man with white hair and looked quite nice. He sort of shuffled right round me in a circle while I stood still and tried to follow him with my head. When he got round to my front again he said, 'Extraordinary!' just like before. Then he took his gown out of a cupboard and put it on. I suppose because I was wearing mine. When he came back he said. 'So you're a friend of Rogers?' I said, 'Yes,' and he walked right round me again. Then he gave me a glass of lime juice.

  After that he was very nice - rather like my grandmother who's dead. He said you were in hospital but he thought you would get better soon and would write to me. He said that there were 'some difficulties with the college too' but that I mustn't worry and that he had been thinking about you 'very hard' in the last few days. He had a file, like the ones we have for geography but bigger, which he said were notes about you. He wrote some more notes in and said, 'Extraordinary,' when he looked at them.

  When I was going he said he hoped I would come up to St. Cecilia's when I was 'grown up' but that he would be dead. Then he called his scout to show me back into the quad and said I mustn't worry again. So now I know you are ill but I don't know where you are. I hope you get better soon. I hope you don't mind my asking the don about you.

  Lots of Love, Tony

  David drew a long breath. It would take Tony to call on the Master when he felt it to be advisable. Heaven knows there were enough fourth-year men, and even incorrigible ex-G.I. Fullbrights, whom the very sight of the door-bell in the Great Quad would cripple. The thought of Tony's erupting upon Ricks, who of course had never seen a boy, was equally superb. Still, the idea of Ricks inspecting Tony as an alien species was disquieting. In what context, too, might Ricks have been 'thinking hard' about himself, Anyway, it was something that Tony had learned within a fortnight that he was ill and had not abandoned him, though the knowledge would have done litt
le to explain his continuing silence. Presumably, too, Ricks had been unable or unwilling to reveal his whereabouts when Tony saw him.

  There was still no sign of Lang. Though he had only been gone some twenty minutes, the sun had already dropped down behind the garden wall and it was both colder and darker in the room.

  David opened the final letter, which had been posted about three weeks after the last in Budleigh Salterton. He had read only a few lines when he became aware that this letter differed distinctly from either of the previous ones. It was not that the interim weeks appeared to have worked a greater despair in the boy, nor was there any sign of an outraged patience. The letter involved only a present, but it was a present whose composition was an unconscious sum of its past. Tony wrote as someone newly possessed of a finer awareness. Of maturity even: though maturity was too gross a word.

  David returned again to the beginning of the letter and, as he read on, the ill-defined sense of some new dimension in Tony grew, and with it there was splashed on to his mind's eye a vision so absolute in its power to command him that for the moment while it lasted he seemed to be struggling for the survival of his senses. The image had been simply of the boy, as he was, writing a grubby letter with a ball-point on a hillside.

  With all his force David swung his suspended leg at the adjacent wall. What might have been a whine of protest came from the other side. The plaster spattered down on the bed and he grinned inanely at the dent, denuded of its glossy paint. It was like the backside of the Turner. David lashed the wall again for good measure and this time the human origin of the protest was unmistakable. He turned again to the smudged letter:

  Dear David,

  I still haven't got your letter, and I think it must have got lost in the post. Our postman has only one leg, so could you send another letter?

  I had to tell my aunt about you - a bit, because you're my friend and I don't know where you are. She said you were probably all right, but I don't know how she can know if I don't. I asked her anyway though.

  We had a concert here. I had quite a big part and wore your other suit. They want me to sing, in something of Vittoria's I think, at a hall in London. It may be on television. After the concert here a little girl came up on the platform and gave a bunch of flowers to a lady who gave a talk about how good the concert was. Then she stood on her toes and kissed me. Everyone clapped. I think it was sort of arranged. I wiped my face and they all shouted 'Shame!' and laughed. Afterwards I washed my face. I've written a letter to London and said I'll only sing if I'm not kissed like that.