The Happy Prisoner

by Monica Dickens

  I was in one of those temporary huts, a sort of annexe to the main hospital. There were twenty beds in it, lockers that looked like soap boxes turned on end, and an iron stove in the middle which always had a few unshaven men sitting round it playing cards. It certainly was rather a bleak spot, but I’ll never forget my poor old Ma’s face when she first came to visit me. I think she expected to find me in a private room, surrounded by beautiful cooing nurses and flowers and exotic fruit.

  She was horrified to think that anyone should have put her son—her son— into a place where the backs of beds were not high enough to support the pillows and the bread and butter for the whole day was cut the night before. Because she was too sympathetic, I, out of cussedness, was too cheerful. Actually, I hated the place. We all did, and used to work each other up by grumbling until gloom hung in the struts of the tin roof like a cloud of cigarette smoke. If an optimistic new patient came in, prepared to make the best of everything, we took a lugubrious delight in schooling him to our way of thought. My mother, of course, sensed the atmosphere, but I told her she was imagining things, not because I was noble, but because I couldn’t stand pity from anyone just then.

  She had taken rooms in the town, and was back again the next day. It wasn’t visitors’ day, so of course she was not allowed to see me. I could hear the argument going on in the passage outside the hut. I knew who would win, and sure enough, the old lady sailed in presently, followed by Sister, scarlet in the face. It was winter then and the windows of the hut were low, but we were not allowed to have the lights on until five. On this particular day, a leaden, soaking afternoon had made it twilight in our hut by about four o’clock. A hideous man called Stringy Salter was making up the stove with a lot of noise. He wore a red blanket round his waist and a filthy white sock over the plaster on his foot. Two other up-patients, very decent chaps really, but not prepossessing, were playing cards. One had a hacking cough and the other had a patch over one eye. We had had our tea, but I had been slow with mine because I didn’t want it, and the orderly had not cleared it away. A plate with a great hunk of bread and butter and a cup without a saucer, half full of tea which I hadn’t been able to drink because it was too strong, stood on my locker beside the old tin lid I used as an ashtray. The man in the bed next to me had died the night before and the springs of the bed were bare, because his mattress had gone to be fumigated. My mother sat down on the black iron and looked at me.

  ‘This is just terrible,’ she said. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ I said airily. ‘It’s fine. You see it at its worst today. Come on a sunny morning when we’re larking about with the V.A.D.s—’ At that moment, the most horse-faced of all the V.A.D.s, a brave old relic of the last war, chose to come pounding down the ward with a bucketful of dirty dressings, like a swineherd going to the sties. The orderlies were supposed to take them from the sluice out to the bins, but they usually forgot.

  One of the men called out to her: ‘Annie—’ That was her name, Annie. Annie Rooney they used to call her. ‘Annie, for Christ’s sake, when are they going to turn these bloody lights on?’ Only he didn’t say bloody, unfortunately. He had to lie flat on his back and couldn’t see I had a visitor.

  Annie answered him tartly: ‘You shut your noise, young Bobby Combes, or you won’t get any light at all tonight.’ That was her idea of a joke. She was a cheery old soul, but to one who didn’t know her finer qualities, she must have sounded a bit grim. She had a voice like a nutmeg grater; she smoked like a chimney off duty and would do anything for you if you gave her a packet of cigarettes.

  I could see my mother getting more and more worked up. ‘Why hasn’t this bed got a mattress on it?’ she asked. I told her and she got up quickly, and Sister, thinking she was going away, came up and said: ‘I shall have to ask you to leave now, Mrs. North. The ward is closed.’

  ‘It should never have been opened, in my opinion,’ said Ma, showing a ready wit. She squeezed my hand in the gloaming and whispered that she would be back tomorrow. I must say, I never thought she would get in. Sister had redoubled her defences by having screens round the bed and saying I had had a bad day and was too ill to see anyone. I could hear them at it on the other side of the screens. I found out afterwards that the men were laying bets on the pair of them and Scotty Macrae won half a crown and a rubber air cushion when my mother came triumphantly through the screens. I don’t know how she managed it, but she came every day after that, visiting hours or not, and Sister pretended not to notice her or arranged to be off duty when she came. She used to talk to me about my mother, of course, and would lay the cold end of her stethoscope on my chest and tell me that my heart was worse. ‘And no wonder,’ she gloated.

  My first hint that Ma was being active behind the scenes was when the M.O. said one morning: ‘Pity that stump of yours is playing us up. You might have been able to go home soon otherwise.’

  ‘Home?’ I said. I had not expected to be discharged for weeks yet. That was one of the things that was getting me down, not having any sort of a definite date to look forward to. Stringy Salter knew when his plaster was coming off and he used to notch the days off on it with a penknife.

  The M.O. looked uncomfortable. He was young and guileless and I suppose he had been having quite a rough time with my mother. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When a patient’s people are prepared to take a lot of responsibility—but I’m afraid in your case, it’s impossible at the moment.’

  When my mother asked me who was in charge of the hospital, I wanted to make a bet myself, but no one would take me. They had all got to know her pretty well by this time. She never would tell me exactly what had taken place between her and the colonel. I knew she got at him through an uncle of mine who was at the War Office, but I’d love to know what they said to each other. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I was suddenly attacked one day with blankets and hot-water bottles and a small swig of diluted brandy—the night nurse used to help herself and fill the bottle up with water—and borne away on a trolley to the accompaniment of cheers from the multitude.

  When I arrived here, in the smartest private ambulance ever seen, I found Sandy already installed and the best bedroom crowded with flowers and books and log fires and hysterically welcoming family. I had no sooner hinted at this room than Ma got a builder to stop doing bomb repairs in Birmingham and fix up this window bed for me. A remarkable woman, my mother.”

  .…

  “I expect you think I’m spoiled,” Oliver said.

  “Not at all,” said Elizabeth, tucking in the last blanket and bending to pick up her dressing tray.

  “My sister Heather,” said Oliver, “says I lie here like a blasted saint. Do you think I’m saintly, Elizabeth? Am I a good patient?” He had been mildly tormented for some time now by curiosity to know what she thought of him.

  “Of course,” she said. “But you must be quiet now. You’ve talked too long; you’ll never get to sleep.”

  “Anyway, I know you think I shouldn’t have been brought home,” he pursued. “You said so.”

  “Did I? That was silly of me, seeing that it gave me a nice job,” she said brightly and escaped before she could commit herself further.

  Did she mean that it was an easy job or that she liked being with them? Or was it just one of the polite, meaningless remarks with which she always warded off attempts at intimacy? Trying to understand Elizabeth made you feel like an archaeologist trying to probe the centuries-old secrets of a fossil. Perhaps Heather was right, and there was nothing there to understand.

  He thought of ringing the cow-bell, to call her back and ask her what she meant. He looked at it, then picked it up, holding the clapper with his finger, and examined the Swiss cow with a leg at each corner painted on it against a background of the Rosegg valley. Having decided what he was going to say, he rang it, hating its imperious jangle in the quiet of his room. She did not come, so he rang it again, and Heather burst in wearing a rubber apron and looking as
though she had no time to spare.

  “What is it, Ollie? You’ve woken Susan.”

  “I say, I’m terribly sorry. I wanted Elizabeth, actually, but I suppose she’s outside burning my dressings.”

  “Well, surely she can hear it from there. Why doesn’t she answer it? That’s what she’s paid for.”

  “Don’t be horrid, Heather.”

  “I feel horrid. We’ve all been jolly nice to her, and she won’t even be friendly. If she wants to be so stand-offish, at least she might do her job properly. I don’t think I’m going to like her very much. Just listen to that little pest upstairs. D’you want anything, before I go and murder her?”

  “No, thank you,” said Oliver meekly.

  When Elizabeth came in later to say good night, he did not talk to her, but waited quite impatiently for her to go. He could feel approaching one of the waves of weariness and depression that attacked him from time to time, and until it passed over he could not be interested in anybody except himself. He turned out the light, and making a peevish face to himself in the darkness, settled down to indulge in a little self-pity.

  Chapter 4

  When Oliver was depressed, the whole house knew it. As he was usually quite happy, he made heavy weather of these fits of weltschmertz, like a robust man who thinks he is dying if he has a cold. He did not think himself into his moods; they just arrived, and that they left him was due to no exercise of willpower on his part. He had no more control over them than a sunbather waiting for a cloud to pass away from the sun.

  Since, apparently, he must suffer them occasionally, he made the most of them and did not attempt to disguise his weariness of soul. If he felt cross, he was cross. If anybody bored him, he showed it. If he did not like some dish of his mother’s, he left it on his plate, instead of throwing it out of the window as he normally did. Cowlin, the gardener, had a fox terrier who had found out Oliver’s mealtimes and used to stand with his hind legs on the lawn and his front paws against the outside wall, head on one side, jaws slightly parted, eyes lustrous.

  When Oliver was depressed, nothing could be done for him. He was determined to savour his melancholia to the dregs. No book that you produced was readable, he did not want the wireless, no food tempted him and he would admit to no appetite, any visitor you offered him was a bore. In fact, he used to put down his book and hastily pretend to be asleep when the doorbell rang. He wasted a lot of time doing this for the postman, the laundry, Joan Elliot, Evelyn’s local cronies and Mrs. Dalrymple, who collected half-crowns for the Hinkley savings group. When Hugo Trevor, who was his friend as well as his doctor, came to see him, Oliver would tell him not to order his artificial leg. He would never walk again and did not want to. Dr. Trevor, an imperturbable man with short limbs, who looked as though he had been carved out of one block of stone, would sit by him and talk about anything and everything but his health, which was the only thing Oliver wanted to talk about at these times. In the end, he would get up, tell Oliver harshly that he was neurotic and go in search of Mrs. North, who was also his friend, leaving Oliver to wallow in the pathos of being misunderstood.

  Then one morning, for no reason at all, he would suddenly feel quite different. He knew it before he was properly awake. A lightness over his eyes, a vitality in his limbs, even in the one that was not there, a tingling in his scalp, as if he could feel the very hair growing, an urge to hop out of the window and across the lawn all told him that the mood had passed. He would try himself out by thinking of all the most irritating things he knew: Mrs. Cowlin’s creep, Heather’s charm bracelet, Violet’s habit of standing in front of the fire with her legs straddled, Fred Williams’ Sunday suit, his mother’s transatlantic habit of saying, “mm-hm”, and “mm-k” when she meant yes and no, Elizabeth’s prim little mouth if she thought you were being too familiar. If he could contemplate all these things with equanimity, he would look at the day before him to see whether it seemed full of possibilities, or a dragging cortège of ticking minutes. Then he would think about breakfast. If he could pass all these tests, he would pick up his shaving mirror, see how his face adapted itself to a smile, and then, if it were not too early, reach for the bell. This was the one time he did not mind ringing it. He could not wait to announce the glad tidings to the household.

  This was the most amusing part of the whole business. Whoever answered it would not know, of course, that they had been liberated and would come in with a patient expression, resigned to whatever treatment they might get, perhaps with an excuse on their lips, expecting to be cursed for taking so long to answer the bell. The relief in their faces and the tactful way in which they said: “You’re feeling better, this morning, aren’t you?” as if it was his health and not his temperament that had been ailing, caused him great glee. Swift as fire, the news would run round the house: “Oliver isn’t bloody-minded any more!” and long before breakfast-time each member of the household would have made a sightseeing trip to his room.

  He had not had a mood for more than three months, and the one that overtook him now coincided with Elizabeth’s week-end off, which meant physical as well as mental discomfort. Elizabeth went to London, and while she was away the district nurse did what she called “stopping by” twice a day to do for him those things which his family could not manage. If she were not so busy, she would have come more often, for she was in love with Oliver.

  She had always been in love with him, ever since she was the stocky, red-haired child at the Hare and Hounds at Burnell Heath, and he was the boy who came on his pony to buy stone ginger beer. The inn was on the edge of the heath, a yellow toy house with a garden divided into neat segments, completely surrounded by a privet and elder hedge against which lapped the gorse and bracken of the common. Oliver, a weedy, fair boy in a red polo jersey and jodhpurs, used to stand outside the hedge drinking the ginger beer with his pony’s reins looped over his arm. Mary Brewer would swing on the gate in the short faded gingham she wore in all weathers. She never felt the cold and would go without stockings or gloves all the year round and glow when other people were pinched and blue.

  She swung on the outside of the gate, so that she did not have to face Oliver, and threw remarks at him over her shoulder in a gruff manner which was meant to show unconcern. Mrs. Brewer, in a butcher-blue pinafore and a hair net, would view the scene from an upstairs window and think what a pretty pair they made. Pity the boy was so skimpy, but he might fill out later if he took after his mother and not his father. Her mind would run away with her and she would rest her arms on the window-sill and dream just as mad, romantic dreams as Mary did. She had bequeathed to her daughter, a star-gazing soul in a homely exterior. If Oliver looked up, she would shake’ out a yellow duster, half in salute, half as justification for being at the window. When he handed Mary back the foam-crusted glass and rode away, she would swing on the other side of the gate so that she could watch him cantering over the common, his pony’s quarters switching from, side to side as it avoided gorse bushes which he meant it to jump.

  Oliver had barely noticed Mary in those days, except as a girl who asked silly questions about his pony. The Brewers were London people and Mary, when she grew up, had gone back to London to learn to be a nurse. Oliver’s New Forest pony became a retired polo pony and then a small hunter and then a man-sized horse, and his ginger beer became a cider and then a pint of Mild. Mary, being older than he, had gone away during the cider stage. He used to ask after her when he remembered, and then, when he had been having pints of Mild for about four years, he stopped his car at the Hare and Hounds on one of his infrequent visits home and found two gaunt, swarthy strangers in the little toy house behind the privet and elder hedge.

  “The Brewers?” said the woman indifferently. “I dunno. I never heard of such people.”

  “But surely you took over from them? You must know them—a fat woman and a little man with white hair. They had a daughter too—what was her name?—didn’t you buy this pub from them?”

  The wo
man laughed cynically to think that he should imagine she had that much money. “This place belongs to a company. Me and Mr. Stark works it for them. I can’t tell you about no Brewers or Stewers or what is it,” she said, and went out of the bar as if she resented being asked to do something which was not in her contract to the company.

  Not long afterwards, Oliver, driving Heather home from a tennis party and wanting a drink, took her into a stuffy little hotel on the main road near Shrewsbury. They rang the bell in the lounge and a short, strong-looking red-haired girl with a plain face redeemed by a broad grin came in, reeled on her solid legs, clutched the edge of the door for support and said: “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Is what?” asked Heather.

  “Oliver North,” said the girl wonderingly. “I haven’t forgotten you, you see.” Heather raised her eyebrows.

  Oliver raked his brains desperately. “My God!” he said suddenly, “Mary. Mary Brewer from the Hare and Hounds. You used to bring me ginger beer. Where have you been all this time?” He knew that Mrs. Brewer had told him, and that the ought to remember.

  Mary, still rather overcome by the sight of Oliver in white flannels and a striped silk scarf inside his open-necked shirt, told him in the same offhand manner with which she used to throw remarks at him from the garden gate. He asked her to have a drink with them and she went away to get the drinks and came back with Mrs. Brewer, still apparently in the same hair net. Yes, she told them, while Mary stood by and admired Oliver, Mary was a State Registered Nurse now, giving her old folks a hand while she was at home on holiday. Done her midwifery and going to start as district nurse here next month. Oh, she knew the business all right. Hadn’t she nursed Mr. Brewer good and proper last week when he cut his hand on a broken hoop?