The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  Gently, taking care not to scare off his good fortune, my lover tells me that he is the only patient now on the ward who would benefit from a secretarial service like the one I am proposing. The other inmates have, at the most, two guests at a time. The difference may be one of character (my lover is agreed to be lovable); it may also turn out that the other patients have come back here so many times they have lost the ability to reassure their visitors, after which point the visits tend to dry up.

  This is my lover’s first major stay in hospital. Transfusions for anaemia don’t count, even when he is there overnight. Everybody I come across refers to transfusions in the cheeriest possible terms (‘just in for a top-up, are you?’ is the standard phrase) though everybody also knows that transfusions can’t go on for ever. That’s an example of something I’ve been noticing recently, of how easy it is for people to rise above the fates of third parties.

  I’m generally impatient with the visitors, but I make exceptions. I’m always glad to see Armchair, for instance. My lover knows so many Davids and so many Peters he gives them nicknames to tell them apart. Armchair is a Peter; other Peters are Poodle and Ragamuffin.

  Armchair is, as advertised, reassuring and cosy, all the more comfortable for having one or two springs broken. Armchair is a fine piece of supportive furniture. When he phones the hospital to leave a message, he doesn’t bother any more with his proper name; he just says Armchair. A nurse will come into the room and say, ‘Someone called Armchair asks if it’s all right to visit,’ or, ‘Armchair sends his love,’ with a faint gathering of the eyebrows, until she’s used to these messages.

  Armchair is actually, in his way, my lover’s deputy lover, or I suppose I mean my deputy. They met a month or two ago, while I was away, and they’ve slept together once or twice, but it’s clear enough that Armchair would like More. It isn’t a physical thing between them, exactly – my lover isn’t awash with libido at the moment – but Armchair would like my lover to spend nights with him on a more permanent basis. Armchair would like to be a regular fixture at bedtime.

  I wouldn’t mind. It’s my lover who’s withdrawn a bit. But Armchair assumes I’m the problem and seems to think he’s taking a huge risk by putting his hand on my lover’s leg. My lover’s arms are sore from the VenFlow, the little porthole the doctors keep open there, and his legs have taken over from them as the major pattable and squeezable parts. My lover’s blood beneath the porthole, as we know, is full of intercepted messages of healing and distress.

  Armchair looks at me with a colossal reproach. But can he really want to sit where I sit? Where I sit is sometimes behind my lover on the bed, wedging him as best I can during a retching fit, so that he is cushioned against the pain of his pleurisy. I hold on to his shoulders, which offer a reasonable guarantee of not hurting him. My medical encyclopaedia tells me that the pleura are ‘richly supplied with pain fibres’. My lover has worked this out all by himself.

  My lover threatens to give Armchair the yo-heave-ho. I tell him to be gentle, not to dismiss these comforting needs, and not only because Armchair too is richly supplied with pain fibres. I have my own stake in Armchair and Armchair’s devotion. If Armchair stops being a fixture, I’ll have to think long and hard about my own arrangements and my tender habit of spending as much time away from my lover as I possibly can. I do everything possible to look after him, short of being reliably there.

  Whatever it is that ties us to each other, my lover and I, he is much too sensible to tug on it and see, once and for all, how much strain it will take. Much better to stay in doubt.

  When I told my lover – he wasn’t in hospital at the time – that I was thinking of spending half the week in Cambridge for a few months, he didn’t say anything. It took him a while even to ask exactly how far away Cambridge is by train, and he seemed perfectly content when I said an hour and a bit – as if it counted as normal variation, in a relationship, for one party to keep himself an hour and a bit away from the other. He didn’t ask if I had some grand plan, like writing a textbook, which I think I mentioned once a while back as one of my ambitions. There’s something very stubborn about his refusal to call my bluff.

  He knows, of course, that part-timers don’t have a lot of say in their timetables (part-timers least of all), so if I’ve managed to fit all my teaching this term into Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then I’ve been setting it up for months.

  In Cambridge I stay in the flat of an actress friend who has a short-term contract with the RSC. She’s staying with friends in London herself, and all she wants is for the place to be looked after. She warned me that she might come back for the odd weekend, but she hasn’t shown up yet and I’ve stopped expecting her, stopped cleaning madly on a Friday and filling the fridge with fine things. So all I have to do is keep the place reasonably clean, water the plants and listen from time to time to her accounts on the phone of Barbican Depression and of understudy runs that the RSC potentates never stir themselves from the Seventh Floor to see. Her flat is very near the station, which keeps my guilt to a minimum. It’s not as if I was holed up in Arbury or somewhere. I’m only an hour and a bit away.

  What I do here, mainly, is take driving lessons. In anyone else, learning to drive – especially after thirty – would be a move so sensible no one would notice it. With me it’s different. It’s a sign of a secret disorder, a malady in its own right, but only I know that.

  I’ve always set my face against learning to drive. I’ve used public transport as if I’d taken a pledge to do nothing else and have always been careful not to accept lifts unless I have to. You get superstitious about favours when you can’t pay them back, not in kind. If someone who has offered me a lift stays on soft drinks, I find myself refusing alcohol as if that was a helpful contribution to the evening. It’s probably just irritating. I dare say people think, if he likes his drink so little he’d make a handy chauffeur, why doesn’t he get his bloody licence?

  I seem to have based a fair bit of my character around not being a driver. Perhaps that’s why I was so disorientated when I walked through the door of the driving school that first time. It felt like learning to swim, and this the deep end. But in all fairness, the air in there would give anyone’s lungs pause. All the instructors smoke away at their desks when they’re on phone-duty or doing paperwork, and there’s a back room that’s even smokier, with a sink and a dartboard and a little fridge, not to mention a tiny microwave and a miniature snooker table.

  I must say I admire the way the driving school draws a new pupil smoothly into apprenticeship. I was given a time for a two-hour consultation with an instructor, who would suggest a test date. I was certainly impressed, and mainly with myself, the competent me they were hypothesizing so suavely. It’ll take more than suavity to convince me that I’m viable as a driver, but I signed up for my session of consultation just the same, rabbit paralysed by the headlights, unable to disobey the order to climb into the driving seat.

  Now that I’m familiar with the place, I can’t help thinking that BSM stands for British School of Macho. There’s only one woman in the place, who does paperwork the whole time and smiles at me with a forlorn sweetness. The rest of the staff, I imagine, conduct their job interviews in the pub, brusquely screening out non-drinkers, non-smokers, non-eaters of meat, non-players of pool, non-tellers of jokes. I imagine them rolling back with the candidate to the driving school after closing time for some cans of Special Brew, and I imagine them huddled outside the lavatory with their fingers to their lips, when he goes to relieve himself, listening for the clinching chuckle when he sees the HIGH FIRST TIME PASS RATE sign stuck up inside the lid. I imagine them giving each other the thumbs-up sign when they hear it. And only then, after the candidate emerges from the lavatory, do I imagine them asking, ‘By the way … can you drive?’

  But somehow Keith, my instructor, slipped through their net. He does all the manly things, but he isn’t a man in their sense, not at all. He’s not a bachelor, but he’s not
by a long way a family man either, and he moved out of a perfectly nice house to live in a field.

  He’s a pleasantly runty fellow, brought up in a Barnardo’s Home, and he still has a boyish spryness although he’s in his late forties. To get from the driving school to the car, or back again at the end of the lesson, he bolts across Bridge Street, whatever the traffic’s like, nipping through the smallest gaps between vehicles.

  We set off in the driving school’s sturdy Metro. It’s white but very dirty, so someone has been able to trace the words ALSO AVAILABLE IN WHITE in dust on the coachwork. The side mirrors are both cracked, and one is even crazed. I promise myself that I’ll reward the car, if and when I finally pass, and not the examiner as is customary. I’ll splash out on some replacement fixtures.

  Towards Keith I have absurdly mixed feelings. I trust him blindly, and have for him the sort of disproportionately solid affection that goes with the analyst’s couch more often than the steering-wheel. I admire his self-control. It’s not that he doesn’t get irritated – when I don’t lose enough speed, for instance, approaching a roundabout – but he calms down right away. It’s as if he was offering me an example, in terms of temperament, of the use of the gearbox, and how to lose momentum as efficiently as possible. When I stall, he says, ‘Never mind, re-start,’ without any hint that he’s disappointed in me. As with any indulgent parental figure, I have an urge to test his patience to the limit, to make sure that he cares underneath it all.

  Once the car ran out of petrol on Queens Road, but all I could think of when I lost power was that Keith had withdrawn his faith in me, and was overruling my accelerator with the brake on the passenger side. ‘Are you braking?’ I cried, and he said, ‘No, I’m scratching my arse as a matter of fact,’ before he realized I wasn’t messing him about. We weren’t far from the driving school, but he’s so little of a walker that he insisted on staying put. We sat there, while his eyes flickered between the windscreen and his multiple mirrors, waiting for one of the other school cars to come by and give him a lift to the petrol station. No one came, and at last, with the light dying, we had to walk after all. But I was so pleased not to have made the mistake myself that I let slip a precious opportunity for mockery – which is pretty much Keith’s natural language – and I didn’t tease him at all. It was nice to be the one doing the forgiving.

  Alongside the exaggerated trust I feel a sharp submerged resentment towards Keith and a desire to do something atrocious, like run someone over on a crossing, while he’s taking responsibility for me. In reality, he would put the brake on in a second, but I imagine myself unfastening my seat-belt after the impact and walking away, never traced for some reason though the driving school has my details, and leaving Keith to deal with the consequences.

  Sometimes he sets out to provoke me, as if he wanted to bring the crisis on. He murmurs, ‘Closer, son, just a little closer, and you’re mine,’ when a child is playing too close to the road, and remarks on the economic advantage to parents of having a child wiped out sooner rather than later, before too much money has been spent on it. But I know this is just his style of cussedness, the same style that makes him answer ‘no’ in the back room of the driving school to the question, ‘Got a light, Keith?’ even when he’s busy smoking away. It seems to be his solution, as a member of the artificial tribe of driving instructors, to the problem of how to be popular, without being despised for wanting to be liked.

  Keith doesn’t ask why I want to learn to drive. He takes it for granted, like everybody else, that I should, though in that case he should at least be curious about why it’s taken me so long to get round to it. Even if he asked, I don’t think I’d tell him my own theory on the subject: that it’s to do with control, and also with risk. Anything that gives me the feeling of control is obviously going to come in handy at the moment, whether or not it’s a sort of control that I have historically had any use for, but I think I’m also giving myself an education in risk. Being a pedestrian, being a passenger, isn’t so very safe – and rattling around on a bicycle, as I do, isn’t safe at all – but behind the wheel of a car you have a different relationship with the risks that you take.

  I try not to keep secrets from my lover, but I don’t talk a lot about what I do in Cambridge. I’m superstitious about that. I seem to think that if I talk to him more than vaguely about Cambridge, the seal will be broken and I’ll start talking about him to the people I meet in Cambridge. For the whole cock-eyed arrangement to work, I need to think of the railway line from London to Cambridge as an elaborate valve, which allows me to pass from one place to another but strips me each time of my mental luggage and preoccupations.

  The ward is full of its own life, and I don’t think my silence shows. The patients tend to keep their doors open, so as to make the most of whatever passes along the corridors. The staff don’t tell you when someone has died, but at least if your door is open someone comes along and says, with an apologetic smile, ‘Let’s just close this for a moment.’ I expect that other people do what I do and peek out of the window in the door, which has horizontal bars of frosting so that I can’t be seen, with any luck. I try to work out, from how long it takes for the trolley to make its collection, who it is that’s inside it.

  I’m sure I’m not the only one making calculations, though it’s not a subject that comes up a great deal in conversation at the regular Tuesday tea parties. Then the focus of attention tends to be the chocolate cake brought in every week by an ex-patient, the offering that is richest in symbolism as well as in calories, which somehow always gets finished. Even my lover puts in his few bites’ worth.

  There’s just one man on the ward who’s in a different category, a private patient who’s recovering from a heart attack in a room that is costing his firm, or BUPA, £210 a day, not including the phone. He takes only short walks as yet, but sooner or later he’ll come to the tea party or twig in some other way to what the problem is with everyone else in the ward. Once he asked my lover why he thought he had come down with this particularly nasty pneumonia. My lover just scratched his head, as if it had never occurred to him to wonder. But it’s only a matter of time before the cardiac patient or his wife see two men holding hands. They’ll be on that expensive telephone to BUPA right away, demanding to know why someone with a bad heart but otherwise good character has been sent to spend his convalescence in Sodom.

  The day-room plays host to other events, as well as the tea parties. There are the art classes and the Wednesday morning discussion groups. Often there’s someone over by the window on these occasions, making faces and emitting harsh sighs, but if so it’s just a patient strapped into the emetic aqualung of pentamidine, grimacing with controlled disgust as he inhales through a mask filled with bitter gas. Sometimes it’s even a discharged patient, coming back for a few lungfuls of fly-killer to keep the bugs at bay.

  Through the open doors, at various times of the week, come the visitors who aren’t quite friends. There’s a manicurist, for one, who asks her clients, when she’s finished, if they’d like a dab of nail polish. She quietens any protest by saying brightly, ‘Some does and some doesn’t, so I always ask.’ The first time she offered her services to my lover, she’d broken her wrist and had her arm in a sling. She couldn’t work, obviously, so what she was really offering was manicure counselling, rather than manicure as such. My lover said, to comfort her, ‘I bite my nails anyway,’ and she said, to comfort him, ‘Well, you do it very well.’

  An aromatherapist comes round from time to time to rub essential oils into people. She doesn’t rub very hard, and my lover longs for a real massage, but it isn’t easy telling her to be merciless. His pentamidine drip has brought his blood pressure right down, and it’s easy to see how she might get the idea he should be handled with care – seeing he needs to be helped if he wants to go as far as the lavatory, which is three steps away. The aromatherapist takes away the pillows and blankets, and gets my lover to lie face down, with his feet where his head u
sually goes.

  I get a shock every time I visit my lover after she has laid her too-gentle hands on him. It’s as if there was some new symptom that could spin him bodily round, from end to end and top to bottom, casting him down passive and aromatic, his eyes half-closed, on the crumpled sheets.

  In the evenings, there are volunteers manning the hot-drinks trolley. They’re noticeably more generous with the tea and the coffee than the domestics who push the trolley during the day, who can make visitors feel about as welcome as bedsores. With the evening trolley-pushers, I don’t have to pretend that it’s my lover who wants the drink if it’s me who does really, and we don’t scruple to ask for two if we’re in the mood. The evening staff don’t look right through me if I sit up on the bed next to my lover in my usual slightly infantile posture, facing the other way down the bed and hugging his big feet. This is the arrangement we’ve evolved now that so much of him is sore that a hug calls for as much careful docking as a refuelling in deep space. For him to see my face has become proportionally more important, as our bodies have had their expressiveness so much restricted.

  My lover’s soreness is dying down; I can tell because the fidgeting has gone out of his feet. I ask, in an interviewer’s tenderly wheedling voice, ‘What strikes you most about the whole terrible situation?’

  Obligingly he answers, ‘It brings out the best in people. And the worst.’

  ‘What, you mean the best and the worst?’

  ‘Both. The two.’

  He’s getting drowsy from the drugs he’s on, as the chemical invasions of his body get the better of the surgical ones.

  There’s a hesitant knock on the door, and when I say to come in, this evening’s volunteer stands in the doorway and asks what we want in the way of tea and coffee. I see him flinch when he spots the bag of blood on its wheeled stand, and the tube going into my lover’s arm. But I notice too a quickening of interest in my lover, in the few seconds before our volunteer leaves the room to get the drinks from the trolley. Even before my lover murmurs, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ I have realized that the volunteer is very much my lover’s type. He bears a passing resemblance to Joy Adamson’s husband in the film of Born Free, a furry-faced scoutmaster on safari.