Firth couldn’t feel much indignation about this; indeed, as the employer of the head of the Hayballs, he felt on the contrary a species of feudal obligation to stand up for the whole ramifying family. Certainly he didn’t want to be bored by unintelligent and prejudiced generalisations based upon the supposed degeneracy of Luke. He was afraid, moreover, that one or other of the dons’ wives would prove actually to be a socialist, and would plunge in with inappropriate political passion on the other side. So he turned to Dr Roxburgh, and asked him what was the news about Binchy.
There was an immediate hush among the people within earshot. It was almost a morbid hush, as if upon the expectation of some obscene exhibit, so that Firth wished he had thought of something else. At the moment Binchy (a man uninteresting except for his curious resemblance to a horse-fly, who ran the post office and everything shop) was a national figure. You could read about him in your morning paper every day. But to have news of him from, so to speak, the leech’s mouth was another matter. Binchy’s success story (as it might still currently be called) must have begun in Roxburgh’s surgery – to which most of those present no doubt took their ailments from time to time. Hence the detectable frisson now.
Naturally enough, Roxburgh hadn’t much to tell, even had the rules of his profession permitted him to be communicative. When a country doctor’s patient vanishes into a great hospital, only a formal letter intimating his discharge (or death) is likely to be the sequel. Roxburgh, however, was at least in a position to say that the last newspaper yarn was true. Binchy had asked for a pint of best bitter, and been given a glass of dry sherry instead. And Binchy – although the activity is discouraged in hospitals – had smoked a cigarette.
So much, Firth thought, for Binchy, from whom he had been accustomed to buy stamps – now England’s star transplant-patient of the moment, with his common man’s common appetites returning to him. A man sitting up in bed, with a long, healing scar down his body, like a weal from a lash vertically laid on, and with somebody else’s inside dovetailed and sutured neatly into him . . . More gin, more vermouth, more ice, another lemon: Michael Firth was grateful for having to make a dash for them. In the kitchen Camilla’s latest help from the village opened the refrigerator. She seemed a competent woman, but he had no notion who she was. She might be Mrs Binchy, for all he knew.
One of the young female academics, a Mrs Ruxton, was tiresome, but not about politics. She was writing a book, or perhaps what they called a thesis, about English rural life in the nineteenth-century novel. Far from being ashamed of this perfectly useless activity, she was evidently determined to run on it, and in its interest she was questioning poor old Baxendale about the murkier side of village mores. Some novelist, it seemed, had said he was far from darkening the picture in his presentation of such matters, and that had he been perfectly candid nobody would have stood for it. Was this true? Was it still true? Young Mrs Ruxton, with a solemn intentness evidenced only among the investigating classes in their female embodiment, put her questions to the Reverend Mr Baxendale with some insistence. Firth tried to head her off, even to shut her up. Was it not a firm principle of research, he interposed, that you got your information at first hand? Mrs Ruxton was a countrywoman now, he went on, and a great accession to their small rural society. She must profit by her environment and enquire around among the villagers, like Wordsworth questioning his leech-gatherers and idiot boys.
This wasn’t a success (and didn’t deserve to be). Mrs Ruxton took the whimsical courtliness of Firth’s ‘great accession’ gag for offensive irony, and she didn’t like his attempted lightness of air about Wordsworth at all. She now showed signs, in fact, of going ahead for the hell of it. This made Firth think rather the better of her, but he listened in dismay, all the same. She was presently asking Baxendale (who was accustomed only to the smallest of small-talk) whether there was much incest among his parishioners. Was incest any longer proceeded against, unless it was mixed up with something else, such as rape? What about rape?
Quite a number of people were listening in on this catechism, and it wasn’t making for the success of Camilla’s party. The locals liked Baxendale, although the men at least hardly ever went near his church. He could be relied upon (except presumably from his pulpit) to keep clear of religion, and he was very much a gentleman of the old school. So the men addressed him as padre on a note of jovial deference suggestive of a good regimental mess. Now they were looking bewildered as well as disapproving. The notion of any pursuit of general ideas was as inaccessible to them as the calculus would be to a tribe of decent and honourable Hottentots, and they failed to see that the young woman had at least started off with no offensive intention.
Firth, a successful solicitor, took it for granted that old Baxendale couldn’t be at all clever. Clerics with any brains surely didn’t grow old in obscure little rural benefices. But that Baxendale was perceptive as well as well-bred did now appear. He had become aware of the small current of philistine hostility towards his interlocutor, and he wasn’t himself going to embark on it. He answered Mrs Ruxton’s questions with an air of serious attention. It was unhappily true, he said, that no human society was likely to be without its areas of depravity. He believed that countryfolk were in the main untouched by some of the corrupting influences operative in towns. But rural communities had their special frailties. You might be doubtful about a child’s paternity in London, but you had to move into darkest Kent to be doubtful about his maternity as well.
‘Shocking state of affairs,’ one of the London dons – not Mrs Ruxton’s husband – interrupted cheerfully. He seemed to feel that, for the first time, something interesting had been said. ‘A part of the world where only the horses can be guaranteed virtuous. Houyhnhm country, one might say.’
This remark – although the last part of it could not have been very generally intelligible – didn’t go down well. But Baxendale maintained his frank dealing with Mrs Ruxton’s curiosities. He had expressed himself extravagantly, perhaps, but every now and then one did hear of a grandmother going gallantly through a kind of ritual child-birth in order to cope with an awkward illegitimacy.
‘Perfectly true,’ Dr Roxburgh said briskly – and with a frank air of approving this break through the common bounds of conversation at Camilla’s parties. ‘Within my own experience. But no names, no pack-drill.’
‘And are they really all pagans still?’ Mrs Ruxton asked. Mrs Ruxton was herself presumably a pagan – if only because she wore suspended from her neck, much in the manner of an object of devotion, what was hideous enough to be a kind of miniaturised wooden fetich from the Benin States. Because she felt that she was at last having an intelligent conversation with an educated man, and vindicating her own character as a very much educated woman, this gauche and aggressive female was now quite happy. Moreover, the people round about had relaxed their disapproval. If the padre OK’d this sort of talk, it wasn’t for them to object. Some of them looked round contentedly and expectantly for another drink. Firth ought to have realised the hitch was smoothed out.
‘Still?’ the vicar echoed, this time allowing himself a hint of humour. ‘Ena, meena, mina, mo. I suppose the children are still pagans when they do their counting out with that jingle. For these are the numerals of the Ancient Britons, I believe.’
‘Professor Pfuhl disputes that.’ Mrs Ruxton, plainly a devotee of learned journals, was happier still.
‘Ah, yes. There is commonly a professor in opposition, is there not? But your main point is a most interesting one. I am myself inclined to think that it is only in novels that a paganism stemming from before our era remains a force amid the rural populace. Neo-paganism is another matter. It would be idle to maintain, my dear young lady, that people anywhere preserve their grandparents’, or even their parents’, regard for their religious duties.’
Dear old Baxendale – perhaps because he had been remarking the modish fetich dangling in the region of Mrs Ruxton’s navel – had suddenly spoken ou
t in his professional character; had, one might say, stood up to be counted. It was unprecedented, or at least unusual, so far as his party-going persona was concerned. Perhaps Firth overestimated the shock. He ought again to have realised that nobody was any longer much minding this particular piece of chitchat. But he had a sense that here was an awkward moment – an awkward moment of a kind that Camilla (who was at the other end of the room) would deal with lightly and deftly, dissolving it and wafting it away on a small current of amusement which she would create on a basis of one-third wit and two-thirds silvery laugh. Firth was unequipped with a silvery laugh, so he had to rely entirely on something witty. He remembered the earlier talk about Mr Binchy of the post office.
‘At least with Binchy’s example before us,’ Firth said, ‘the vicar can hope for a change of heart.’
That had been the whole thing. The joke – not really a joke so much as a mere play upon words – had been his own. People had been moderately diverted – those who had tumbled to what he was talking about – and had drifted away to form other groups. But now, himself in hospital just as Binchy was in hospital, Firth was recalling his rather obvious quip as tasteless and humiliating. He worried about it a good deal. At times he even sensed in it something magical and ominous. He was doing so when he became aware of one of the white-coated figures looking with a wooden face at a clinical thermometer and then giving the instrument a discontented flick. Firth knew that his temperature had gone up.
And he supposed that his hearing had been affected. This would account for everybody’s having been so uncommunicative. He seemed to have an ear only for interior voices, or for very small sounds like the hum (which might be air-conditioning and the like), or for that very big sound which intermittently shattered the place. For a long time he worked at disentangling the component parts of this big sound, rather as one wholly inexpert in music might work at disentangling the several instruments in an orchestra. He ended up by finding it very simple. There was always a roar, and usually there was a high whistling scream as well. When the big sound came while darkness was going on – and he was living or existing through nights and days, he supposed – it was accompanied by hurtling and blinking lights reflected on walls and ceiling. Eventually, and with an immense sense of intellectual achievement, he realised that only one explanation was possible of this fiendish outpouring of superhuman energies hard by where he lay. The hospital was sited beside a major airport.
It puzzled Firth that anybody should plant down a hospital so perversely. He could think of no rational occasion for doing such a thing.
2
They had told him something reassuring about his wife. At least he supposed it was that – for a great trouble was the way in which things kept slipping out of his memory. It was obvious that they had been at work on his head, and he was obliged to give them credit for stopping the very bad pain there. But sometimes he was angry with them for being careless. They must have left a hole in it, he reasoned, for things to keep dropping out of it as they did.
Several times he had thought about Camilla. Several times, while keeping hold of his general situation, which was that of a seriously injured man lying in hospital, he had reflected that she ought to be sitting beside him. She ought to be there holding his hand, or drawing grapes on a little cardboard tray out of a paper bag. But Camilla was never there, and one day he saw that there might be a very simple reason for this. Camilla was dead. Or perhaps she wasn’t dead, but merely injured. They had been in a crash together, and now she was in a different part of the hospital, or in a different hospital altogether. This second hypothesis would account for whatever reassuring thing they had said.
But Firth could remember nothing at all about an accident. Along with much else, any recollection of it had trickled out through the hole. He would be a complete nuisance to himself and others until the hole was stopped up. He must locate it himself, he decided, and firmly point out their oversight to the white-coated surgeons and stiffly starched nurses. These people seemed concerned to do their best for him, and would take appropriate action at once. Cautiously and when he felt nobody to be looking, he put a hand up to his head.
Thus began the curious phase of Firth’s covert exploration of his own person. He was like a schoolboy in a dormitory, apprehensive of disciplinary interference in his private affairs on the part of a puritanically minded prefect. The resemblance was accented by the fact that he now knew himself to have companions. This was a ward; there were several other beds quite close to his; the first thing he was aware of about their occupants (as was natural in an English institution) was their social standing in relation to himself. He must be in a public hospital, he realised, and not even in what was called an amenity bed, since his fellow sufferers so plainly belonged to the lower classes. Occasionally he heard snatches of their talk. They seemed well enough to be chattering together from time to time.
‘Given ‘im a pig’s, they ‘ave,’ a voice said. ‘And not even a take it or leave it, mark you. Unbeknownst, with ‘im ‘elpless under their bloody anesthekik. Right down there, too.’
‘Gor!’
‘Who knows ‘ow things run into each other like – down there? Sniffing and grunting, ‘is next kid will be, if yer asks me.’
‘A scandal it is – a bloody scandal. Wot they got this place they call their catchment area for – eh, mate? Airport on one side, and bleeding speed-track on the other! Look at the ambilances, I say. Coming in all the time, they are, wot with one sodding crash following another. But the ‘uman bits and pieces is all kep’ for the bosses. Pigs’ liver for you and me, mate – and not even served with bloody onions.’
Not unnaturally, Firth was filled with horror by this macabre (and subversive) talk. If, of course, it was talk. For he was having so many lurid dreams now that it was difficult for him to be quite sure about what were veridical reports of his senses. But he was prompted to step up, in a nameless apprehension, his stealthy fingering over of his own body. His first discovery was that he had only one hand, his left, available for the purpose. His head had been so obsessing him up to now, he supposed, that he had failed to be aware of his right hand and arm as bandaged and largely immobile. There was something almost reassuring in the discovery – or there would have been but for one isolated but acute perception that came to him. What had happened to his head must be far more serious than what had happened to a hand or arm, and it was clear that the white-coated figures understood this. But they were more interested in the state of his hand. He felt no pain there. But when the doctors or surgeons were present, it was there that a lot seemed to be going on. Perhaps his accident had resulted in his breaking a great many small bones in that part of his anatomy. All the same, there was something strange about it.
Lying flat on his back on the hard hospital bed, he was unable to explore himself below the line of his buttocks and genitals. But his fears extended no further, so this didn’t greatly matter. The tips of his fingers, moving over his belly with the always slightly strange sensation of double touch, found the scar of his old appendectomy. At least he was almost sure it was that; that what his finger ran along was cicatrice and not a mere crease in a tummy no longer in anything like youthful trim. So that if anywhere else there was another cicatrice . . .
The depth of his irrationality, which he momentarily glimpsed as having to do with fever or delirium, stabbed into Firth’s mind. And before his mind’s vision – for his eyes were shut – there appeared, again only momentarily, the apparition of a monstrous horse-fly. Why a horse-fly? Firth hadn’t a clue. But he was able to enunciate to himself a single word: phobia.
It is always comforting to be able to put a name to things, and the mere finding of this one relaxed Firth’s tensions for a while. Then his left hand was fatuously at work again. He could get its thumb, he found, between his shoulder-blades, and zigzag it down a progressively broad area of his back. Short of his thighs, in fact, only a quite small scapular region remained beyond the reach of t
actile investigation. Eventually his left arm began to ache as a result of its unaccustomed contortions, but by that time he really knew that his body – apart from what might have happened to his head and right hand – was unviolated.
So he reassured himself. Only he hadn’t been able to see. Even when he undid the buttons of his pyjama jacket and the cord of his pyjama trousers, and so wriggled a good part of his torso naked; even when he did this and cautiously humped up the bed clothes into a little tent with his left forearm; even then, all that was visible was a shadowy and foreshortened projection of himself, like Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Deijman viewed the other way on. At least he didn’t seem to have lost weight as a consequence of whatever had happened to him. His protuberant abdomen showed as the segment of a circle – a circle the diameter of which suggested itself as not greater than the breadth of his hips. At its apex his umbilicus swam in a darkness taking the form of a crater, so that the whole of Michael Firth appeared to culminate in a small volcanic landscape, mysteriously softened beneath a surface of milky snow. But it was a landscape without a foreground. He could just glimpse his nipples as a species of repoussoirs moving the eye towards the navel which formed the centre of the composition. He was unable – perhaps it was because of the way his head was bandaged – to lower his chin so as to get any view of his chest.
He didn’t bother to button up again, and of course he couldn’t with one hand retie the cord of his pyjama bottoms. They would suppose that fever had made him restless. He lay back – or rather he simply relaxed, since he was always lying back. He glimpsed it as odd that this phobia – the word recurred to him – should momentarily have resolved itself in what was virtually an aesthetic experience: his own person as an artist might have taken a squint at it. He recalled, quite idly, that there had been a time when he wanted to be a painter. During his last year at school, and in bouts at Cambridge, it had been almost like an illness. Then, of course, he had entered the family firm.
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