Shuttlecock

by Graham Swift

  ‘I see. And what would you say if I were to say to you that this suspicion of yours is none of your business?’

  ‘I – er – would have to accept your word on the matter, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But would it stop your suspicion?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Would it in fact prevent you from taking steps of your own to follow up your suspicion?’

  ‘I – er – No sir.’

  ‘In other words, you think that something in this office demands investigation and if necessary you yourself, on your own initiative, would carry out that investigation?’

  But now he didn’t allow me time to answer.

  ‘Ironic, Prentis, isn’t it? We are the ones who investigate others. That we should have to investigate ourselves.’

  He smiled sourly. It was the first hint of some possible confession. I felt afraid.

  ‘Tell me, Prentis. Missing files, mixed-up files … Been going on for some months you say. So what’s kept you quiet up to now? Is there something else, perhaps, you haven’t yet mentioned?’

  The eyes sharpened, as if my thoughts were on view.

  ‘Perhaps, sir … But I’d rather clear up the general issue first.’

  ‘You’d rather clear up the general issue first. Hmmh. You see, if I were a suspicious man – like you, Prentis – and if, let’s suppose for the sake of argument, something really is “going on” – I might be saying to myself now that what you call this “considered observation” isn’t really a considered observation at all but some sort of disguised allegation. And I’d be saying to myself that a man like Prentis wouldn’t just come out with an allegation by itself like that. He’d back it up with a little bit of homework of his own. I’ve been watching you, Prentis. You’re suspicious, all right, and crafty – and’ (his face seemed to draw suddenly closer) ‘just a little bit desperate. So – I’d better find out what information he’s got up his sleeve before either I make some stupid denial or incriminate myself. It’s lucky for you, Prentis, I’m not a suspicious man.’

  ‘Sir, I – ’

  ‘No, no, it’s all right. You’re a responsible junior, acting according to his conscience.’

  He took off his glasses and began to rub them diligently with a handkerchief. When people take off their glasses it gives them a vulnerable appearance; but at this moment it was as though Quinn was indicating he was prepared to fight without artificial protection.

  ‘You know I’ll be leaving this job in three and a half months.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘It won’t be me who’s sitting here then. Three and a half months.’

  He held up his glasses to the light, squinted at them, huffed, and began rubbing again.

  ‘Tell me something else, Prentis. Allow me to ask some questions just for the moment. You’ll have your turn for yours to be answered, but let me clear up mine first. The others – Fletcher, Clarke, O’Brien – have they noticed any of these things you’ve mentioned?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. They may have done, but never spoken about it.’

  ‘But nonetheless, it’s you and not one of them who’s come forward with this suspicion. Why do you think that is?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I am – the most senior of them. And – with respect sir – there have been previous occasions, talking with you – ’

  ‘Could it just be that they are simple, trusting souls who want a quiet life and ask no questions?’

  He finished polishing his glasses and replaced them over his nose.

  ‘How long have you been in this department, Prentis?’

  ‘Eight years.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a good job?’

  ‘I can’t complain, sir.’ (Liar. You’re a persecuted little drudge.) ‘The conditions, the – ’

  ‘No, no, no. I mean the function we perform here. Do you think it’s a good one?’

  ‘I don’t know it’s something you can judge like that. Basically, we provide information.’

  ‘But do you think it’s a good thing to provide information?’

  He got up and moved towards the window, turning his back towards me.

  ‘Have you had moments in your life, Prentis, when you’ve found yourself asking the simple question: Is it better to know things or not to know them? Wouldn’t we sometimes be happier not knowing them? Know what I mean?’

  For a moment I thought: He’s stalling. He’s not going to tell me anything. I will have to resort to other methods. Break into his office at night and crack his safe. Silence the security guard with a stiletto.…

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘And what’s your answer been?’

  ‘I don’t know. Circumstances usually decide that for you. It can be – a torment not knowing things.’

  ‘Ah yes. Quite so. You suffer either way.’

  He turned round, away from the window. For some reason his face seemed pinker and pudgier than I’d ever known it.

  ‘Do you know what I think of this job, Prentis?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘It’s – uncomfortable. That chair –’ he pointed to the big black leather chair which, though unoccupied, seemed to have a masterful, sinister quality of its own – ‘is uncomfortable. Try it. All this information we sit on, Prentis. Do you know how I sometimes imagine this place? A big cupboard for the collected skeletons of half the metropolitan population. And I’m the one with the key. Oh, I don’t mean the things we have to let out for quite specific reasons. But just think for a moment of all those innocent, unwitting people whose peace of mind might be shattered by some little titbit we have here. It’s an odd thing, Prentis, looking at other people’s lives and seeing the dangers that they’re unaware of. Like – looking at a fly and wondering: shall I swot it?’

  As it happened – as though expressly to provide Quinn with his image – a fly had flown into the room through the opened window only minutes before, and after buzzing several times round the desk settled on the rim of a cup of coffee which Quinn had only half drunk. Yet, oddly enough, he did not brush it away.

  ‘There was a time when I didn’t like this job, Prentis. All this accumulated evil, constantly sifting through it. You have to admit it gets you down. It sticks to your hands, so to speak. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Er, yes sir.’

  ‘I used to tell myself that the solution was simply to curb one’s imagination. You’ve heard me tell you to do just that enough times, haven’t you? But you can no more curb the imagination than you can stop the truth being what it is. Do you follow me, Prentis?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  ‘Never mind. Then I started to think that precisely because I had access to all this evil, I was in a position to do real good. I thought, perhaps one can wipe out certain harms simply by erasing the record of those harms. With me? But I’m not sure, now, if you can do that. I’m not sure at all.’

  He moved across the room and perched himself on the edge of his desk. There was something almost comical about this casual posture in a man like Quinn. His lame leg swung and knocked against the panelling of the desk with an oddly solid thump.

  ‘What do you think, Prentis? Is it right?’

  Once more, he did not wait for my reply. He twisted round and pressed the intercom on his desk.

  ‘Miss Reynolds – be a dear and bring in another two cups of coffee.’

  He turned back and took a deep breath. ‘I seem to have said enough, don’t I? No, I’m not trying to duck your questions. I’ll answer them. But I don’t know if this is the right time or place.’ He picked up a diary from the desk. ‘You want to know – everything, don’t you? Would you care to come and see me, one evening after work – at my home?’

  Two years ago, if Quinn had invited me to his home, I would have gone, uneasily, regarding it as an office duty. Now I was not sure whether I was walking into some strange friendship – or a trap.

  ‘You look alarmed, Prentis. Yes, I know. Nobody knows much about me outside
the office. The office persona and all that.’ He smiled sourly again. ‘You probably know more about any number of people in our records than you do about me. But I do have a home, and a home life of sorts.’

  He had a pen poised over the diary.

  ‘What day would you like? You can get to Richmond?’

  ‘Richmond?’

  ‘Richmond, yes.’

  ‘Wednesday?’ I don’t know why I said that day.

  ‘Wednesday. Fine. Shall we say about eight? Ah – Miss Reynolds.’

  Miss Reynolds (a frosty-faced spinster of some years, renowned in the office as ‘The Iron Lady’, and the perfect partner to Quinn) entered with a tray with coffee and biscuits. She put it down on Quinn’s desk and removed the dirty cup – from which the fly buzzed upwards. She brushed at it with her hand, then left the room.

  Quinn, like the avuncular figure in the biscuit commercial in which I sometimes mentally cast him, poured, stirred, asked, ‘Milk? Sugar?’ and proffered cup and saucer. It was because, I found myself thinking again, he had none of the outward attributes of power – height, sternness of feature or manner – and because, in some way, power really did not suit him at all, that his actual power so impressed – and maddened me.

  ‘You look baffled, Prentis. As you say, it can be a torment not knowing things.’

  I had confronted this formidable man who now was offering me coffee and Lincoln Creams. It did not seem such a daring act.

  Quinn sipped his coffee. Through the glass panel I caught a brief glimpse of the office – Eric, Vic and O’Brien hunched at their desks like guinea-pigs in some controlled experiment.

  The fly circled in towards the desk and settled on the plate of biscuits. We looked at it closely for some seconds and then, as if agreed on something, at each other.

  ‘Tell me, Prentis – forgive me for not asking for so long – how is your father?’

  [24]

  I am amazed at the resignation, the composure of some of Dad’s fellow inmates at the hospital. In my two years’ visiting I have got to know several of them quite well. When I have sat out with Dad on the bench and walked back with him to the terrace and the wicker chairs, it is almost like returning to some haven of civilization after an interlude in the barren wilds. We sit, like old soldiers on a verandah, reflecting on lost glories. The ward windows catch the evening sun until it sinks behind the trees and the boundary wall. The shadows creep along the terrace. Inside, all the chores of the day have been done – meals served, drugs administered, bed linen changed, the ward floors swept and cleaned. The day staff wait to be relieved by the night staff, and Simpson, the ward orderly – who nods familiarly to me, as if I am just another member of the strange club for which he acts as steward – comes out to smoke away his last few minutes of duty. There is peace, order, stability – like nowhere else. And it seems to me that this is because here all the harm has been done; no one can be harmed any more.

  They do not look like rebels, these figures in their maroon dressing-gowns and faded bath-robes, like men who have trespassed beyond the bounds of sanity and been penned up for their pains. I have been thinking what would happen if some of those red-faced men with their cigars at the golf course (relaxed and at peace in a different way, and only members of another sort of club) were to be picked up by some giant hand and placed in one of these hospital wards. How they would scream and squeal and kick and be outraged. I would half like to be that giant hand. But these men, in their wicker chairs, they sit as if they are past argument, and even secretly thankful for something.

  In the hospital everything goes in circles, or in irreversible regressions. Simpson, for example, used once to be a hospital inmate himself – not in Dad’s hospital but another. When the time came for him to be discharged, he could find no other environment conducive to his peace of mind save that of a hospital and no other work save that of a hospital orderly. But the proximity of his job to his former condition naturally made it easy for him to slip back into it. So, for fifteen years, Simpson has been living in an ambiguous world in which he is sometimes patient, sometimes hospital employee, and even now, on occasion, instead of leaving the hospital at night for his bed-sit, he will nestle beneath the covers of one of the empty beds in the ward, and no one seems to mind. Simpson does not mind, himself. He is fifty-eight, wiry-haired, with leathery, unchanging features. He looks at you with a fixed, capable stare, like some servant of bygone days who would defend to the last his right to be no more than an underling.

  Then there is Des. Des, who of all the occupants of Dad’s ward I talk to most and who most takes the role of the one who ‘keeps an eye’ on Dad for me when I am not there. Des was once a Merchant Navy officer and entered the hospital nine years ago as a result of a head injury received in an accident at sea. On recovering, he applied to the relevant authorities for compensation and a disability pension. The authorities replied that the accident had been caused by Des’s own negligence and he was therefore ineligible for compensation. Des denied his negligence and proposed to contest the matter. The response to this – even after Des’s discharge from the hospital – was that the evidence of a man whose mental faculties were in question was inadmissible. For four years Des strove to have his claim upheld. The worry and exasperation involved induced recurrences of mental illness, thus strengthening the position of those judging his case. The constant questioning of his sanity in time dislodged it. He returned to the hospital for longer and longer periods, which eventually merged into a permanent residence in which his hope of receiving justice receded irrecoverably into the never-never. Now he sits on the terrace, like someone relieved at last of some burdensome misconception, and talks on these gentle summer evenings, without a trace of bitterness, of that other man, not himself at all, who by now has command of his own ship.…

  This gradual drifting back of discharged patients is a regular occurrence. Newly admitted patients are put into four wards which are for short stays only and from which, in theory, patients are sent out again into the world, wholly cured. In fact, a fair number of these released patients return, and this second visit is already a sign, not so much of incomplete cure, but that they have found the hospital atmosphere amenable and beguiling, they have formed a dependence. Other, longer visits follow the second one; with each, the probability of yet further visits becomes stronger; until they begin to live more out of than in the normal world, and, as with Des, permanent residence becomes inevitable. The hospital accepts this pattern. It is even embodied in its internal structure. For, apart from the two male and two female admission wards, there are, for each sex, five other wards which, broadly speaking, mark off the decline of any given patient. A patient who makes successive returns is gradually passed down the series of wards – first into those where residence can only winkingly be termed temporary; then into those where the prospect of never leaving the hospital is an unspoken certainty; then into those where the outside world ceases to exist, even as a concept. The passage through the wards, as through the mouth of a lobster-pot, is, almost without exception, one-way only. For some reason, the wards, which are normally referred to simply as A, B, C, D and so on, were once given by some euphemist the sweet-sounding names of flowers and trees (‘Acacia’, ‘Anemone’ etc.). There is a joke in the hospital that the ‘G’ in the case of the last male and female wards (‘Gladiolus’ and ‘Geranium’) really stands for ‘Gone Completely’.

  Dad is in ‘Eucalyptus’. It is more than halfway along the floral procession of wards (past the still hopeful and, in Dad’s case, briefly visited ‘Chrysanthemum’ and ‘Dahlia’) and therefore past the point where rescue is likely. But they do not seem alarmed, these men in their dressing-gowns. They smoke, offer cigarettes and flick the ash off their knees like ordinary people. And, above all, they do not seem to beg release from the perpetual circles of their ‘conditions’; they have ceased to try to escape. I have enjoyed these men’s company – often silent or obscure, but pleasantly unpredictable and strangely f
ree from everyday anxiety – as much as, if not more than anyone else’s. More than Vic and Eric at the office, with their persistent chatter (which is only mine reciprocated) of cars and hire-purchase schemes and of (they should worry) getting nowhere at work.

  Sometimes it strikes me that this agreeable impression is all a tremendous mistake. Sometimes I reflect that these men are ill; inside, they are in torment, they have terrible problems. I think of how little perhaps I know (though it has become familiar enough to me over the months) of the hospital; of what horrors there might be in ‘Fuchsia’ and ‘Gladiolus’ or even behind other, unmentioned and out-of-the-way doorways. And I think of the asylums of old in which the mad were locked away from view like concealed sins; of how these visitors, even now, who appear to flock in so readily on Sundays, perhaps fret and pull against the chain which ties them to the family monster and to an insidious nether-world of nightmares; of how the hospital staff, some of whom, it is true, are decidedly eccentric, manage to stop themselves, amidst all this derangement, from being infected by madness, of how they make the transition after work to the normal world of wives and children. All this gentle liberalism (‘no doors are locked – patients are free to come and go’), all this atmosphere, on the terrace of ‘Eucalyptus’, of tranquillity and strange immunity, even the country-garden rose beds and lawns and rhododendron clumps, which now and then infuse you with a sense of inviolable idyll – all of it perhaps is a lie. But then, can the flowers and the trees lie?

  Quite often I play chess with Des, on a fold-up wooden table on the terrace. Whatever has happened to Des’s mind, it is perfectly adept at chess, for he usually beats me. We sit on opposite sides of the table and Dad sits, looking blankly on, between us, as if we have given him the duty of umpire, and now and then we say, keeping up a pretence, ‘Dad’ (for Des uses that word too as if to show he and I have the same interests at heart) ‘where shall I move? Which is the best move? The rook or the bishop?’ And we imagine that when a move is successful it is Dad’s advice that has brought it about. Sometimes I get so absorbed with the game – not just as a means of whiling away the visiting hours but with the game itself and being there on the terrace – that the official time for visitors to leave comes before I am aware of it, and Des has to preserve the position of the pieces for another day. When I show a reluctance to stop, and even to leave at all, Des, and Simpson too, occasionally wink at me, as much as to say, ‘We understand.’