In the Middle of the Wood

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “Why did you start on a book like that?” said Ralph.

  “I don’t know. Yet I had plenty of other hobbies. I used to bowl but I stopped that. And I used to be a curler. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to find out what history was all about. I left school at the age of fifteen but I always had an inquiring mind.” He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one, padding restlessly about the room, oldish, restless with a grey moustache.

  “I write books,” Ralph volunteered suddenly.

  “You mean you publish them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You could maybe tell me what you have to do, then, to get a book published. I’ll try and publish it when I’m finished.”

  “You must have it neatly typed,” said Ralph, “and then you send it away to a publisher. Some publishers specialize in certain subjects. I don’t know who would publish your book. It’s a big thing, isn’t it?”

  “It is. I don’t know when I’ll finish it. I wanted my wife to bring me some books last time but she forgot. I wanted to take notes but I can’t seem to concentrate. I used to be able to concentrate. I used to work till four in the morning. But I can’t concentrate here. I think it must be the drugs.”

  The psychologist was listening carefully but not speaking. “What’s it like when you leave the hospital?” he asked eventually.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you come out. What’s it like? What do people think?”

  “Nothing. They don’t think anything of it nowadays,” said Hugh expansively. “In the old days they did but not now. They think of it now as an illness. It didn’t bother me. People used to come up and speak to me just the same. I started on my book again when I left the hospital. I worked very hard at it. And then I got another depression and tried to kill myself again. The house is full of these cards. My wife is always complaining. I’m working on the history of the Trade Unions just now. There’s a lot in that.”

  “I’m sure,” said Ralph. “But the main thing is to have it typed neatly.” He couldn’t imagine the appalling labour this man was involved in: it made him tired just to think about it. Why, he couldn’t even read a column of the Daily Express himself.

  “What paper do you read?” he asked.

  “I read the Sun and the Star. At one time I used to read the Telegraph but it gives you a wrong slant on things: it’s very Tory. I used to read the Financial Times as well.”

  So here was another actor who pretended to have delusions about authorship. First of all there was a stepson and then a potential author. What an extraordinary thing: the coincidences were bizarre and therefore not coincidences at all. And all the time the psychologist was silent: he had an infinite capacity for vigilance.

  Hugh stopped talking and sat on his bed smoking. Then he walked out into the corridor again. Time passed so slowly, there was no end to it. He must ask that Irish psychologist again how long he was likely to be in. He might be here forever. And Hugh’s wife would never come to see him, that was certain. She too had betrayed her husband, she would have mixed up all his cards while he was in hospital and when he arrived home there would be such a chaos that he would go mad again. And again, why had he been so silly as to hand over his business to his sons? Would men never learn the infinite greed of the human heart?

  When the lady psychologist sent for him he took his list of complaints with him. She was sitting at a desk, a charge nurse beside her. Did she need a witness in case he attacked her?

  “How are you feeling today?” she asked brightly. “Do you still think you’re being spied on?” Wordlessly he handed her the list and she glanced rapidly over it.

  “What is this?” she said.

  “Proof,” he answered tersely.

  “Proof of what?”

  “That I’m being spied on. That it’s all a charade.” The charge nurse didn’t smile nor make any sign at all. He simply listened.

  “What is this about a Mexican hat?” she asked the charge nurse.

  “I don’t know. I’ll look into it.”

  “On the light,” she said to Ralph. “It must be a mistake. Nothing important. Someone playing a prank.”

  “To you nothing is important,” said Ralph. “That’s where you’re wrong. Everything is important. Everything is linked. You think I’m ignorant. I’m not. I’ve read Freud and Jung. I know more than you think.”

  “And what is this about a surgeon dropping a match on a pillow? I don’t understand any of this.”

  “It was in the other hospital,” said Ralph. “He obviously wanted to get me into trouble.”

  “And what’s this about a stepson? Do you know anything about this?” she asked the charge nurse.

  “There’s a patient called Ronny in the same room. He’s a stepson.”

  “Oh, I see,” and she smiled for the first time. “And because you’re a stepson you think that we. … Jolly funny.”

  “Not at all funny,” said Ralph indignantly. “More tragic than funny if you ask me.” He wanted to shout at this woman who didn’t seem to be listening to anything he was saying.

  “Tell me about your wife,” said the psychologist briskly.

  “What about her?”

  “Have you been making any bad phone calls to her?” Bad, as if he was a child.

  “No.”

  “But you must believe that she loves you. She is coming to see you tomorrow. She phoned to tell me.”

  “I don’t want her to come. I want her to stay away. When will I be out of here?”

  “Oh, it won’t be too long if you behave yourself. But you do believe that she loves you, that she worries about you.”

  “Love,” he said, “what does that mean? The world is so meagre. I saw that in Yugoslavia.”

  “Meagre?” she said. He felt that he had already mentioned this to her but he couldn’t remember. The desk in front of her was bare, meagre. That was how the world was. Flat, without depth. The bareness, the lack of ornament, the invincible presence of things, their demand to be heard.

  The charge nurse was looking at him intently, and fiddling with a pencil.

  “I don’t understand what you mean by love,” said Ralph. “How do we know?”

  “How do we know what?”

  “What people are thinking. They may be talking to you about one thing and thinking of something else. How can we see inside their heads? We have our own theatres inside our heads.”

  “I see.” She glanced at the charge nurse. “But you haven’t been making threatening phone calls.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry about that stepson, that Ronny. I didn’t realize. … You didn’t like your stepfather, did you?”

  “No.”

  “He lived in a world of his own, didn’t he? He was always reading.”

  “Where did you get that from? Has Linda been talking to you?”

  “No. You told me yourself.” The woman’s glasses glinted in the sparse autumnal sunshine which shone through the window behind her.

  “Did I?” said Ralph. “I can’t remember. But it’s true. He did live in a world of his own. I tried to get into it but I couldn’t.”

  “And it wasn’t a meagre world, was it?”

  “No. Eventually I got into it. But when I was a child it was hard.”

  “You mean as a child you never got into that world.”

  “No, I didn’t. I wondered about it. How he could be so self-sufficient. How he didn’t need me. How he didn’t seem to know my name. Sometimes when I spoke to him it was as if he was coming out of a trance. He had a large bald head.”

  “What?”

  “A large bald head. I used to watch. It was like a big marble with veins in it. And his eyes were always cold. As if he was saying to me that I had no right to exist. I used to wonder if he ever thought about me at all.”

  “Did you think he was plotting against you?”

  “I used to hear my mother and him whispering in their bed at night. I used to listen at th
e keyhole but I could never make out the words.”

  “As in Yugoslavia?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People talked around you there and you didn’t know what they were saying. Isn’t that right?”

  For the first time he regarded her with a wary respect.

  “That’s true,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you? You believe that no one can understand things except yourself. You under-estimate other people just as your stepfather did. You never listen to them. When did you listen to anyone last?”

  “I listen to the characters in my books.”

  “That’s different. When did you listen to any living people? You despise me: you are surprised that I should have any interesting thoughts. You think you know more than I do about my own subject. And yet what I have said is quite obvious. In Yugoslavia you couldn’t make out what people were saying any more than you could make out what your father and mother were saying in bed at night. What happened to you in Yugoslavia?”

  “Nothing much. We visited a cave.”

  “A cave?” The word hung hollowly between them.

  “Yes,” he said, “an icy cave. It was so cold.”

  “An icy cave?” She echoed him.

  “Yes,” he said. “It was so cold. In the bowels of the earth.” After he had said the word “bowels” he wondered why he had used it. It sounded like a cliché.

  “And all around,” he said, “there were faces and bodies, all of ice.”

  “Did any of them remind you of your father?”

  “He used to play chess. He never played against people. He played out problems from the Observer and the Sunday Times. There was a chess player among the figures.”

  “In the cave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else? Did you visit anywhere else?”

  “We visited a sort of colosseum. There was no roof on it.” He stopped again, thinking.

  “A building without a roof?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why wasn’t it finished?”

  “Because the fairies who had been building it flew away at dawn.”

  “Jolly good.” The woman pushed papers about on her desk and said, “Now don’t you be rude or violent to your wife when she visits you. She is suffering a great deal and she loves you, whether you believe it or not. Otherwise she wouldn’t come at all. She phones me up to find out how you are.”

  “She would wouldn’t she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wants to know how her play is progressing. In any case this place is a theatre not a real hospital.”

  “Did your father take notes?” she asked him obliquely glancing down at the list he had brought her.

  “When?”

  “For instance, when he was reading a book?”

  “Yes, he did. He left hundreds of notes in jotters when he died.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “I kept them. I sometimes use them in my novels.”

  “What were they about?”

  “Oh, about lots of things. Comments on life. Notes on books he had read.”

  There was another silence and then she said, “Well, I think you’re making progress. I’ll see you again shortly. Meanwhile you can go along to your room.”

  “There is one other thing,” he said. “About King Lear.”

  “What about King Lear?”

  “A man in my ward says that he gave his business away to his children. They never come to see him.”

  “Who is this gentleman?” said the psychologist to the charge nurse.

  “I think he must be talking about Hugh. He comes from Bowling. He says that he gave away his business to his sons.”

  “I know you’re an actor as well,” said Ralph to the charge nurse, and for a moment there was a flicker of what might have been malice in the latter’s eyes.

  “Cut along now,” said the psychologist. “I’ll see you soon. But you are feeling better?”

  “Yes. A little.”

  “Jolly good.”

  There was a flash of hockey sticks in his mind, girls in green uniforms, a green field with an umpire in it. And then he was out of the room.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Lady Macbeth who was passing in her ashen helmet. It was as if she was sleepwalking, having surrendered a precious kingdom as well.

  He got it into his head that he didn’t have the courage of Ronny. Why, if he was a real writer at all, he should enter the other wards, the mad ones, the lower circles, he should listen to the mad songs, the elegies, but he was afraid. But surely before he left here he must enter these wards, he must find out what it was like to be at the extreme limits of existence. In the place without music, without harmony. He must talk to these two flat-faced crew-cut lunatics who walked about slowly, perpetually shovelling the autumn leaves into their barrows, gathering wounded nature from the world of wind and rain. He had not faced life: and this was what had happened to him. He had not looked into the darkest corners with his torch. He admired Ronny, large, noisy, careless.

  “I don’t care,” said Ronny. “I’ll go there but I won’t take my pills.” It seemed to him that Ronny symbolized all those men of free spirit by which the human race had been impelled up the shaky ladder of evolution from the rank green nameless grass.

  “The old men are funny,” said Ronny. “I like them.”

  When Linda came to visit him he told her about this. She looked at him with large dry eyes as if she were stunned.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know what I’m talking about. I haven’t suffered enough yet. You started me on the road but I must go further along it.”

  “I started you on it?”

  “Yes. With your drama. I wish you would come out into the open.”

  She was wearing her red velvet suit and looked neat and desirable. He regarded her with hopeless longing. She had brought sweets and oranges. He showed her the first verse of a poem he had written.

  And as we wave goodbye

  I know we shall not meet again

  either here or earnestly

  in another place beyond this pain.

  He saw the tears springing to her eyes. Oh, how clever she was, what duplicity she had.

  “You must know an engineer as well,” he said. “He has done something to the phone.”

  Through the window he could see Heydrich and the handicapped girl strolling among the autumn leaves hand in hand. Heydrich tall and blonde talking to her in an animated manner.

  “What kind of tree is that?” he asked Linda, pointing out to the lawn. The tree leaned like a cherry tree towards the ground with its umbrella of pink petals.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen one like that before.” Heydrich and the girl passed under the splendid heart-breaking tree.

  “The man there thinks he is Heydrich,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Apart from that he’s okay. Of course he’s an actor. He’s trained for the part. I must say he’s very good.”

  For a moment there, there was a gap and he saw through it, and the gap closed again,

  “The psychologist says you may not be long in here. Maybe another two weeks.”

  “I know I’ll be here a long time,” said Ralph. “I know I’ll be here forever.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The logic of the plot demands it.”

  “What plot?”

  “The plot has an invincible rightness. I’ve been caught in my own plot. My stepfather saw to that. And there’s a boy here exactly like me. And a man who gave away his property just like King Lear. He’s trying to be a writer too. And his wife mixes up his notes. There are too many things. …” He rubbed his head. “The comprehensive power of the plot. Sometimes I feel as if I’m inside a machine.”

  “You know I love you,” said Linda tearfully. “You know there is no one else but you. You kno
w that, don’t you?” Her voice echoed mockingly as if from the inside of a cave.

  “So you say.”

  “But it’s true. I’ve always loved you.”

  “Why should you love me? I can’t see why you should. There’s no reason for it.”

  “Of course there’s no reason for it. That’s what you don’t understand. That is what love is.”

  “Love!”

  “It’s caring for someone. Surely you can see that. I care for you. I don’t want to see you like this.” And she cried again, trembling and shaking. But he regarded her with a cold eye. Who could believe anything that anyone said. In the last analysis everyone was out for himself. All the ethical systems that had ever been woven like a spurious tapestry were a lot of crap: tiny men with tiny teeth had nibbled and nibbled till they had climbed the ladder from which they could see whole landscapes. The world was an eternal spy story with double agents, triple agents, secret scripts. A man must always look over his shoulder to check if he was being followed. Even the most innocent spectator, that one lounging by the lamp-post, was part of the plot.

  “If you could only come straight out with it,” he said. “Admit it.”

  “Admit what?”

  “That you’ve found someone else. It would be much simpler. That psychologist. You’ve said you always wanted to be a nurse. That you never liked being a secretary. That you didn’t think it was useful.”

  “But … what psychologist? Who are you talking about?”

  “The Irish one. The one who came to see me first. I suppose you could call him handsome. Perhaps even charming. He’s certainly handsomer than the taxi driver. And something as complicated as this would require a psychologist. Then again your mother was a nurse. Perhaps there’s a secret union which looks after its own. Look, how do we know what happens in hospitals? They’ve got the power of life and death over their patients. They can kill them, sign certificates. Hospitals are secret closed societies. The word goes out. This fellow is making a nuisance of himself. Let’s get rid of him.”

  She stared at him in astonishment as if the fertility of his imagination had stunned her. In her infernal reds, in which fires were burning, he saw the glow of the tree behind her. Petals lay on the ground below it. Everything was burning away, but was it being resurrected?