Next morning, after the injection, Paul told Dr. Bruneau that he must speak with him; Dr. Bruneau led him into the bureau formerly occupied by Dr. Vernet. Without preamble Paul demanded that Dr. Bruneau should reveal to him the precise implications of his condition; the latter, with ill-concealed exasperation, replied that he had nothing to add to what he had already said. Paul, having anticipated this reaction, asserted that Dr. Bruneau had told him nothing of significance; he now wished to be told definitively whether the relapse would entail the loss of the pneumothorax. Dr. Bruneau retorted that the problem was incidental to the main problem, which was to stop the pleurisy; he added tartly that since Paul had elected to be supervised by Dr. Dubois, he should govern his curiosity until the latter’s return.
Paul got up to go, hesitated, then said:
“You told me that these days there was always something which could be done.”
“I said that? About what?”
“My condition.”
“You mean something more radical?”
“Yes.”
“That could only be as a last resort.”
“It would be so very drastic?”
“Probably.”
“What?”
“I can’t say; time enough to talk in such terms when everything else has failed.” Dr. Bruneau looked at his watch and, to show that the interview was over, made the movements preliminary to getting up.
Paul raised his voice to retain him. For two years, he said, every variety of substance had been pumped in and out of his body. When and at what point would it be decided that everything else had failed? Dr. Bruneau replied that the finer shades of the question could be debated indefinitely: the short answer was that everything would be said to have failed when local treatment had ceased to produce adequate results. There was a moment, said Paul, beyond which this sort of existence could no longer be endured. Dr. Bruneau denied this. He said: “Everything this side of death can be endured.”
Both men were silent.
“You must have learned by now that the body and the mind speak with different voices,” Dr. Bruneau said at last. He got up.
“That is all that you have to tell me?”
“That is all that there is to tell you.”
Paul remained a few seconds in thought, then turned and left the room.
“The sleeping pills you give me are not strong enough, Sœur Rose.”
“They would send an elephant to sleep.”
“Elephants probably sleep more easily than I do.”
“Well, you can’t have anything stronger.” Sœur Rose proffered the capsule between her trembling, foreshortened fingers, dropped it, raised her eye-shade like a visor and looked about her. “Ah, voilà!” She picked up a small piece of cotton-wool, held it to her left eye, then threw it angrily to the floor. Paul watched her intently. Was he going to get a double supply? Sœur Rose hesitated, then got protestingly to her knees. “Ah, enfin!” She polished the elusive capsule on the hem of her skirt, then handed it to Paul. As soon as she left the room, Paul put the capsule in an empty match-box, which he then placed inside the drawer of his table de nuit. He was resigned to passing a bad night; he was resigned to passing thirty bad nights.
The decision eased his mind, but sleep eluded him. As it grew later, so he became more confused. At times it seemed to him that he had already collected sufficient capsules and this impression became so persuasive that once at midnight and once at two o’clock he turned on his bedside lamp and examined the contents of the match-box. When at last he slept he dreamt of Michèle, a muddled, anxious dream in which their past redeveloped in terms of the future, a dream which left him, in the first moments of waking, with the feeling that in some way time had resolved their difficulties and that they were together again. Then as his mind cleared and in the moment that he realised that he had been dreaming, this concept was replaced by another. He pulled aside the sheets; he had over-slept, he must hurry; Michèle was occupying the room two doors down from his own and he had not yet started to re-heat her coffee.
The door opened and Sœur Rose shuffled into the room.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Davenant,” she said, setting down his breakfast tray on the bed-table. “Eat your breakfast quickly—Dr. Bruneau will be puncturing you in under an hour.” Her face puckered, she was trying to remember something. “Oh, and he said be sure that you remembered to shave under your arm.”
Paul drank half a cup of coffee, then got out of bed. As he lathered his cheeks he wondered whether he could endure thirty more days. What was the alternative? He stared at the reflection of the taut, extended surface of his throat and ran his thumb over the blade of his open razor. Two minutes’ work as against a month’s. How deep did one go? Did one cut or stab? What were the chances of success? Irrespective of whether or not he had the courage to cut his throat, he had to acknowledge the fact that capsules probably offered less scope for failure. As far as he knew, fifteen grains of pheno-barbitone constituted a lethal dose, and each capsule contained a single grain; as a precaution he had arbitrarily doubled the estimated amount. If life became intolerable he would allow himself the bonus of a few days right at the end.
He shaved his armpit. The plover’s egg was now little more than a black and yellow inset in the surface of the skin, but the marks of the trochar and of the subsequent penetrations were clearly visible. He raised both his arms; the single, shaved armpit looked like the mark of some penal confraternity.
His toilet completed, he returned to bed and awaited the summons to the Service Médical. He heard Sœur Rose walking down the corridor towards his room. This was it. He swung his legs out of bed and started to pull on his socks. “No, no,” cried Sœur Rose as she came into the room. “I have only come to make the bed.”
Five minutes later he was again lying back on his pillow. ‘Thank God no one knows how agitated I get,’ he thought. And he reflected how the whole of his life had been the attempt, sometimes more, usually less, successful of concealing the true nature of his feelings from those about him.
The house telephone rang in the corridor. Paul sat up, but awaited additional confirmatory sounds. Silence. He lay back. Rapidly approaching footsteps. He pushed back the bed-clothes, put his feet to the ground. The door opened and in came the femme-de-chambre. Paul hastily took his Mauriac from the marble-topped commode.
“Ça va bien? Oh, oui, ça va bien,” she said. She brought in a broom, shook it over the floor and then attempted to sweep up the débris which fell out of it. “How is your good-looking, well set-up friend who visits you?” she demanded. And as Paul replied non-committally, she added: “One would never guess that he wasn’t well. I’m sure he knows how to make his wife a happy woman!” In whatever part of the room she was working, she was attracted to Paul’s bed as though by centripetal force; she interspersed her other tasks with the flattening and puffing up of his duvet, the tucking in of his sheets, the straightening and aligning of his pillows. “I must go now,” she said. “I hope you don’t think this is my ordinary work.” She smiled, winked, and tapped Paul’s thigh. As he smiled back at her, she laughed and said: “And I also know what’s underneath your sheet ….”
The telephone rang again. As Sœur Rose entered the door, Paul pulled free the sheets which the femme-de-chambre had just tucked tightly into place.
“No,” she cried, raising her arm like a traffic policeman, “Dr. Bruneau only wants your temperature chart. Where is it?” Up went the eye-shade and she peered about her. Paul pointed to the chest of drawers.
“Ah!” Sœur Rose hurried over to the chest of drawers and snatched up a newspaper.
“No, next to the newspaper.”
“Ah!” Sœur Rose located and seized the chart, carried it with the newspaper to the door, stopped, scrutinised both objects and tossed the chart on to Paul’s bed.
“But you want the chart,” said Paul.
“Don’t muddle me,” said Sœur Rose, going out of the door. She was back in five minutes.
“I told you not to muddle me and now you’ve gone and made me make a fool of myself in front of Dr. Bruneau,” she wailed.
“When is he going to aspirate?”
“Soon. Any minute. Be patient. Where is your chart?” Paul handed it to her.
“Ah!” she said accusingly. “If it was on your bed, why did you tell me to look on the chest of drawers?”
Paul lay and waited. The moment before the insertion of the needle; then the moment when the needle jagged its way through the flesh, probed relentlessly beyond the area that it was anæsthesising, stabbed a nerve, or with dull sound struck a rib …. Would the trochar slide in easily or would it encounter channels of calcified tissue through which it would not pass?
Emile came in with two envelopes addressed in Michèle’s bold, clear handwriting—they had been brought down from the Châlet Anniette. Paul took them with great eagerness, first opening the one which bore the later postmark. Absence of news, she wrote, was rendering her imagination as sombre as his own; he must know that she had no one to confide in, no one to turn to; she begged him to have pity on her and to reply by return of post. Below her signature (and just above the faint imprint which she had made to form the outline of lips), was the message: “Have faith in our love! It is stronger than anything which can oppose it! The future is ours!” Paul then opened and read the earlier letter.
He was about to write a reply when Sœur Rose came into the room with his temperature chart; an entry had just been made of twelve different kinds of bacillus and streptococcus which had been identified in his pleural fluid.
Paul lay down his pen. What, in such a context, could he write to Michèle? His eyes closed.
Forty minutes later he awoke, looked dully at his watch, then realised with sudden panic that his summons to the Service Médical must occur at any moment and that after the aspiration he would be in no condition to write; thus Michèle would be pointlessly subjected to an extra day’s suspense. For the time being, expediency must resolve the issue; with a combination of weary self-disgust and of relief he wrote consolingly and optimistically of his condition. Then he folded the letter, sealed it, and took it down to Emile.
When he returned to bed he lay face downwards, his head under his pillow, indifferent to telephone bells and footsteps in the passage.
“Wake up, belle au bois dormant,” grumbled Sœur Rose as she shuffled in with the lunch. She set the tray on the bed-table. “Puncture this afternoon. Be ready,” she said as she went out. Paul sat up, rubbed his eyes, then removed the cover from the réchaud—a mixture of fat meat and beans. He separated a dozen of the beans from the meat and ate each one separately.
He fell asleep immediately after lunch but woke when Sœur Rose returned to collect the tray. “Bonne cure,” she said, drawing the curtains. He fell asleep again, waking (more with his body than with his mind) about an hour later; he groped for his watch, but was able neither to interpret the position of the hands nor even to be sure that he was holding it the right way up. Was it morning, evening, afternoon or night? Then he realised the significance of the light beyond the curtains, and he looked again at his watch. An hour until the end of the cure de silence and the aspiration, then after that the balance of the afternoon and the whole of the evening. Automatically his thoughts turned to his razor, to the length of cord which secured his dilapidated trunk, to the drop which separated the balcony from the ground.
At the end of the cure de silence he once more abandoned himself to listening for every sound in the corridor; there was a succession of footsteps and the telephone bell rang so frequently (though no one came to his room) that at last he got out of bed and went into the passage. Doors were open up and down the corridor; the staff was occupied in preparing the rooms for the patients whose arrival was anticipated towards the end of the week.
A little later there was a knock at the door and in came Mme. Anniette, crying:
“Des salauds! Des salauds, je vous dis!”
“Madame Anniette!” cried Paul, sitting up. She took his hand, then with a single movement divested herself of her cape and swung a heavy suitcase on to a table. And as she opened the case and took out some of Paul’s clothes and some food which she had prepared for him, she related how, when she had arrived five minutes ago, Emile had had the impertinence to tell her to use the back lift.
Then, suppressing her indignation, she came and sat down by Paul’s bed. Good wishes from all the occupants of the châlet, good wishes from the postman, good wishes from the lady who collected the laundry—Mme. Anniette ticked off each with her fingers.
“Ah, monsieur, if wishes could heal …” His room, she told him, would be ready for whenever he wished to return and any other lodger temporarily in occupation would be “foutu dehors!” At last, with the promise that she would call again soon, she took her leave.
“Bonne cure,” said Sœur Rose at six o’clock.
“The aspiration?”
“Ah!”
“When is it to be?”
“Soon. Any moment.”
At seven o’clock Sœur Rose brought in the supper tray.
“Bon appétit,” she said, setting the tray on the bed-table. Then a thought occurred to her: “Wait! Don’t eat! I will first find out about the puncture!” Three quarters of an hour later she returned to collect the tray. “What! Not eaten? How does monsieur expect to grow up into a big, strong man?” she demanded with mock severity: Then: “Ah! The puncture! Wait! I will telephone Sœur Miriam!” She went out of the room and returned smiling serenely, her eye-shade perched above her brow like an inverted coronet. “Sœur Miriam says you are to enjoy your meal. Dr. Bruneau went down to the village before dinner but he said he would puncture you when he got back at nine.” Paul opened the réchaud—it contained an omelette.
Half-past eight. Nine o’clock. Half-past nine. The door opened and in came Dr. Bruneau.
“Comment cela va-t-il?” he demanded. Without replying, Paul drew back the bed-clothes and reached for his dressing-gown.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting up.”
“Why?”
“For the aspiration.”
“For the aspiration! At this time of night?”
Paul looked at Dr. Bruneau with sudden misgiving.
“Sœur Rose said you were going to aspirate at nine o’clock.”
“At nine o’clock,” repeated Dr. Bruneau in a puzzled tone of voice. Then he suddenly laughed. “So I am, cher monsieur. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”