Some days later a message came down from the private ward saying they were having difficulties with a very important patient who couldn’t be sedated. He needed constant attention. Steve had been sent up to keep an eye on him, and had already been there for more than two hours.
‘We’ve been asked to supply cover,’ Jack explained. ‘Go and stand in for your mate, Ginger, so the lad can have his lunch break.’
Off I went, bounding up the flight of steps that led into the main hospital building and on to the corridor past the well-stocked patients’ library. Jack was always telling us never, never, never except in the gravest emergencies, to run inside the hospital. It gave a bad impression. Still, I couldn’t help youthfully leaping up those two or three steps at a time, especially with the sense of release after struggling down from the wards with the deeply depressed patients who came to Outpatients for their ECT.
Most of these victims were middle-aged in-patients, but a few arrived each week for the preliminary talk with a doctor and then the electric-shock therapy. There was an old lady who came for her treatment every Thursday afternoon. Recovering, she would be seated in the outer curtained-off room. Then each week she would begin:
‘Where’s Denis?’
It fell to Martha, since she was so good at it, to sit beside the distracted lady, responding to her plaintive demand.
‘Where’s Denis?’
‘He’s coming as soon as he can,’ she’d say—Steve disappearing through the curtains into the main waiting area to hide his tears of laughter, heading towards the stairs and the labs for specimen results, back to the wards for another patient, or to X-ray for their dark transparencies.
‘But where’s Denis?’
Denis was the old lady’s middle-aged son. Dressed in a dark blue, pin-striped, three-piece suit, he brought her to Outpatients at exactly the same time each week, then collected her, regular as clockwork, just two hours later after trading in the City.
‘So where’s Denis?’
‘He’s been held up in traffic—but he’s on his way, he’s on his way.’
‘Where’s Denis now?’
‘He’s looking for somewhere to park the car,’ Martha ad-libbed. ‘Go on, have a biscuit, have some more of your tea.’
And so it continued, with her helpless litany compelling Martha to ever more elaborate stories.
‘Why isn’t Denis here yet?’
‘He’s talking to the doctors now about what to do for the best. He’ll be here in just a minute. Don’t forget your biscuit. Any minute now, any minute.’
Finally, as if summoned by Martha’s words, Denis himself, a balding, overweight businessman, suffering from the heat as his moist pate made evident, arrived through the screen curtains, and took his distracted mother away and off our hands for one more week.
Every Tuesday and Thursday the porters would be sent up onto the wards where the long-stay patients lived. Usually they were so heavily medicated they’d partially lost control of their legs. Steve and I helped them shuffle along. Some could barely lift feet off the ground. Painfully slowly down the main hospital corridor we would go, the ladies in their pastel shades and dusty pink slippers or mules clinging for dear life to the wooden rail that ran along the wall, Steve generously chatting them up as they went.
‘There you go now. Mind the gap. Stand clear of the doors,’ he’d say. ‘Just one more step, one step at a time. And keep your pecker up, sweetheart.’
Beyond the second set of screening curtains was a black leatherette couch, a sterilized trolley with short plastic airways to prevent patients from being choked, and the apparatus to induce artificial epileptic fits. The medical profession had been delivering electric shock therapy for almost two centuries. What good did they imagine it could do?
One Egyptian woman we helped down twice a week appeared entirely immune to it all. Martha told me she was once a doctoral student working on Proust at the University of Cairo. But everything had to be abandoned when her fiancé, in a maddened attempt to wound her, shot and killed her sister instead. This student of À la recherche du temps perdus had attempted suicide many times. Poor soul, she was nearly shapeless in her light middle-eastern robe, clinging to the corridor rail. Once in a while, as she crept along between one of the porters and the wall, Mr. Roger Bannister, the former four-minute-miler and consultant at the National, walked thoughtfully by on his way to a ward round or a meeting with hospital governors.
One unsteady step after another the Egyptian lady went, struggling down into Outpatients, a white-jacketed porter in attendance. We would help her to sit down in the screened-off outer treatment room, and there she waited for her artificial fit. It was believed to release a chemical in the brain that made real epileptics elated after their episodes. Lowered into an armchair, the one-time research student would be engaged in painfully stilted chat by the staff nurses.
‘And how are you doing today then?’ asked Martha. ‘You’re no better? Oh dear. So where are you planning to go for your holidays? I hear Lisbon’s nice. No? Well, what have you been reading?’
Brought down twice a week, each in their turn, the patients were put on a respirator and given a paralyzing drug. Jack and a nurse, one on each side, would then help to restrain the person on the couch while she, or occasionally he, shook violently. On one occasion, when a staff shortage took Jack elsewhere, I was called in to perform that task. There the patients lay, a doctor holding the heavy contacts that transmitted the shock against both temples of the papery-skinned, unconscious, violently shaking patients. As they came round, the doctor would encourage them with enthusiastic words about how they were feeling so much better now, remember?
Towards the end of August, our Egyptian scholar suddenly stopped coming down for treatments. Wondering why, Steve asked Martha if she’d got better or something. With relief at another’s prayers answered, Martha explained how she had been transferred to University College Hospital for yet more tests. Once there, she had managed to heave herself out of an eighth-floor window—and anywhere, anywhere out of the world.
Dressed in a loose green skirt, with an embroidered white cotton blouse, the young doctor from psychology, a little department in a wooden shack up on the roof, was paying her weekly visit to give our electric-shock patients their aptitude and memory tests. I asked what her questionnaires were intended to show.
‘That they don’t have much left of either,’ she said, and it was as if the ghost of those researches into lost time echoed a moment in the air around us.
One Friday in late August, Tina, the girl who shared that bed-sit near the Crystal Palace, gave Alice a nod and a wink: she wouldn’t be back till the following afternoon. Here was at least one more chance to be together before September.
Dusk was beginning to close in as we strolled back from a café across some unkempt parkland, behind tennis courts and a community hall. The sky was strewn with white cloud-tails above roofs of semis, the houses’ green paintwork glinting at a distance. On ahead, the parched grasses sloped away across a playing field to rows of small houses down in a hollow. There was some washing fluttering on an aluminium clothes dryer that looked like a large raised umbrella with its covering replaced by the waving white pieces of cloth—so many flags of surrender in the breeze.
Alice had bowed to the inevitable and would, if accepted, be starting a teacher-training course at Bristol in the autumn. She was back from a visit to see her old tutor up North, to talk over plans and pick his brains about the pros and cons of going into teaching. But he had been busy and evasive. Now she was confessing to me her infatuation as a means of distancing it—a little ashamed of having imagined that attachments formed in that strictly limited space of time might be such as to last beyond it, and expressing an unexpected disillusion with her undergraduate idol. He had, of course, agreed to write the reference, but the valve of his charisma and projective enthusiasm regularly employed on female students had now been abruptly turned off.
‘Made me feel like an unsold, end-of-line bargain,’ she said.
‘I suppose it’s bound to be like that. He can’t get off on the infatuation any more, so he has to move on to the next batch, and then the next, and so on, until he retires.’
‘I think we were all a bit in love with him,’ she said. ‘You know, he’s such an inspiring lecturer, and has done so many exciting, creative things with his anthologies. You know the cover of the most recent one, the Louise Nevelson sculpture-assemblage—did I mention I saw the original in New York?’
The sky was offering an unusual range of cloud forms that evening. Most peculiar was the fact that the different shapes appeared to be moving in contrary directions. So if a pink one was rising above the darkening trees and going approximately north, across the Thames, then those few trails of cirrus had to be heading west towards Heathrow and the sunset.
She must have picked up on my faintly jealous irritation, because she switched the direction of talk by wondering mildly what might happen when we were back from the five days in Amsterdam. After all, London to Bristol was not an especially difficult commute.
‘Well, I promised I’d go to Italy, but I can’t see it working out really. She’s bound to get bored with the galleries and stuff. Then that’ll be that.’
‘But why Italy?’
‘Always wanted to go,’ I said, not fully answering her question, ‘and now I’ve got to see the frescos at first hand if I’m going to be doing this MA at the Courtauld … and my dad was there during the war.’
‘Oh, your dad again, is it? You’re always on about him, but you never so much as mention your mother. Now why is that?’
We were standing on the slope of yellowed grass. The drift of her words had brought back once more a trace of the childish urge to run home, home to one of those houses, past that washing on the dryer, back across the road from scouts, back to mum with my sister Christine almost a teenager and just starting high school. How many years had it been since Dad had keeled over in front of his class with a heart attack? Just for a moment I couldn’t remember. The doctor who examined him said he couldn’t have felt a thing, dead before he hit the classroom floor. After that, Mum was obliged to go back to teaching herself, a career she’d never exactly chosen. Mum would get through periods of depression and the medication prescribed for it. There she would be, sitting in the lamplight of our living room, curtains not drawn, front garden shadows looming, feet on the coffee table, and a toppling pile of English essays for marking on the floor beside her.
All around now the dusk was deepening, the neon lights coming on as we strolled back to her flat above the sweetshop. There was just a trace of something like fear to be sensed in that thickening darkness—as if the street lamps had caused it, blinking on pale in the sunset.
‘What can I say? My mother … She’s a mystery to me.’
Then Alice turned and looked me square in the face. She seemed about to speak, but merely smiled instead. We walked on a few yards further.
‘I suppose you must feel terribly guilty,’ she began again. ‘You never said goodbye to your dear old dad, and you don’t think you loved him as much as you should have. Then again, you’re probably afraid you love your mother just a little bit too much—so you never talk about her, and generally give the impression of being completely un-filial. I shouldn’t worry about it, though, darling. It’s really quite normal.’
‘Look, just because I don’t talk about my mum all the time doesn’t mean she isn’t important to me.’
‘Oh, poor Rich!’ exclaimed Alice, with such a knowing look—as if needing to underline what life as an oxymoron might feel like.
No, running home to mum was not the answer. And picking up on the uneasy silence that followed, Alice let the topic drop. There and then, in the empty street, she took my arm. Side by side, as lovers do, towards her room, we walked—me gratefully taking a last glance back towards the houses, their laundry waving its offered surrender, and the street lights’ globes of amber on their arching concrete poles.
As I say, a message had come down from the private ward to the effect that they were having difficulties with a very important person, so I stepped with excited anticipation into the lift and pressed the button for the private ward. It would be the first and last time I ever went there. At the reception desk, Sister and a cabal of consultants were confabulating around the phones. One of them had a sanatorium on the line, and was explaining that their patient was suffering from a pre-senile dementia, but that it could be significantly retarded with the right cocktail of drugs. The patient, a managing director of some big electronics firm or other, would soon be able to resume his post, regardless, and for many years to come. The hospital had admitted him that morning in a condition dangerous to himself and those around him. At this discreet sanatorium, somewhere in the Home Counties, the drugs could be administered; and this very important person would be nursed back to socially useful lucidity. An ambulance had been ordered for early that afternoon.
‘Good,’ said Sister, turning from the phones. ‘You must be the replacement porter.’
‘I’m afraid he was rather hyperactive earlier in the day,’ she said, as we set off down the spotless corridor with its rows of private rooms, their doors all firmly closed.
‘They said in Outpatients that he could be violent?’
‘No, not really,’ Sister replied. ‘He settled down once we gave him something, and I don’t think he’s been any trouble to your friend here. However, I would recommend that you keep a healthy distance. Agree with whatever he tells you. Don’t be doing anything that might at all upset him; and don’t, whatever you do, try to restrain him if he does become agitated. Call for assistance. There’s an emergency bell on the edge of the bedside cabinet—on the right as you face it. If you think he’s becoming even the slightest bit out of control and you’re getting into difficulties, use it. We’ll have an ambulance here for him before you can say Jack Robinson. But I don’t think you need expect much of an ordeal.’
Sister opened the locked door to a large, well-furnished room. Steve was standing over by the windows. They were open, for the cooling breeze, but caged in with close wire mesh to guard against suicide attempts like the one that had offered a release to our student of Proust. Turning as he heard the two of us enter, Steve came striding towards the door.
‘See you later,’ he said to a large man in loose-fitting winceyette pyjamas who was pacing restlessly back and forth about the scrubbed and polished floor. Then Steve gave one of his infectious smirks, and a wink as he slipped out of the room for his lunch break. Sister also proffered a reassuring smile and closed the door, leaving me alone with this very important patient.
‘Come over here, young man,’ said the dementia sufferer. ‘I want to show you something.’
He was stoutly built, with thin grey hair that must have usually been combed back over his head in a controlled wave. Today, it fell sideways in the shape of a ski-slope over one ear. He had small, but well-defined features. The sagging skin of his face showed broken blood vessels flecking the upper parts of his cheeks. On top of the striped pyjamas, whose trouser bottoms fell in loose folds over his slippers, he was wearing a white towelling bathrobe.
‘You are a doctor, are you not?’
‘I am, yes … I am.’
‘May I ask you what kind of doctor? You certainly don’t look old enough to be a doctor. You must be completing your training. Tell me, precisely how many years does it take to qualify?’
‘Oh, about seven,’ I guessed.
‘Whatever you do,’ the patient continued, ‘don’t become one of those pill doctors. They don’t do you any good at all, and I should know. Damn pill doctors for drug addicts wasting the public’s money, that’s what I say. Take my advice, young man, do you hear, go into surgery. You be a surgeon. They’re the only bona fide doctors. You are a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I’m training to be one.’
‘Well, come over here, then, my good fellow, and let me show you just what’s been driving me right round the bend!’
Warily, I advanced a couple of steps as the important patient strode over to the window, leaning out as far as he could until his forehead was touching the wire-mesh cage.
‘A surgeon is exactly what I need, of course. Had enough of these tuppenny ha’penny pill pushers. They’re no damn good, the lot of them. What I’m here for is my operation. I’m waiting for my operation. You’re aware of that, are you not?’
‘I am, yes.’
A faint breeze from the open windows caught the disordered remnants of his hair.
‘You’re not lying to me, are you, young man?’ he said, his voice beginning to rise. ‘You’re not one of those pill doctor fellows, by any chance? No good to me, if you are. Let me tell you, you might as well get right out of here this minute if you’re one of their sort, you hear me.’
Down in Queen Square the thick layers of leaves above its garden barely stirred with that faint breeze. The August sun was at its height, the narrowest of shadows outlining the tiny bodies stretched out on the grass below. Between the leaves I could intuit the outlines of secretaries and nurses who had raised skirts well above their bare knees to improve and extend the tanning of their legs. There were some doctors sitting talking in shirtsleeves, ties loosened, top buttons undone. Technicians and porters lay on their backs, some with their shirts removed, making the most of that scorching lunch hour. An ambulance arrived. Two porters were carrying another stretcher up into reception.
Pigeons and sparrows were alighting around the fountain with its water UNFIT FOR DRINKING. And there you were sitting on a bench nearby with your high rounded forehead, the determined expression of your mouth in repose, your dark brown straight hair, parted in the centre and falling to your shoulders. You were finishing your packet of homemade sandwiches and dusting the crumbs from your flowery smock. Birds were pecking at the few scraps you threw them, coming up close to you, no distance at all, almost eating from your hand. By then I knew you had given in, had agreed to meet up in Brussels after my week in the Netherlands. But why had you agreed to that? Maybe you thought it wouldn’t last with her, wouldn’t even survive the week in Holland. No doubt you were giving me one last chance. And, in a way, I suppose that’s what I got.
Others might say that the best thing in the circumstances would have been a clean break, but, of course, there’s no such thing. The hurt to come from not breaking up was something that nobody could have predicted, though with hindsight this plan of mine looked crazy enough to deserve some foreboding. But the trouble with being young is you think you’re immortal. I should have known better.
I should have known better. But now you were glancing down at your watch, twisting your wrist round to see the face at your pulse, the thin black ribbon you used as a replacement strap quite visible. Then, your lunch hour over, you stood up from the bench and set off in the direction of Great Ormond Street. As you did so, always a great devourer of crime, you dropped a green Penguin Marjorie Allingham who-dun-it into your embroidered shoulder bag.
‘Just look at that! Look at that laziness! Get back to work right now, will you?’ It was the chairman, leaning out as far as he could, shouting through the cage, shaking his fists, as if the sunbathing hospital staff down below could hear and would take notice of him.
‘Get back to work, I tell you,’ he yelled. ‘Would you be so kind, young man, as to go straight down to the shop floor and order those wastrels back to work?’
But who did he think he was talking to now? Yet no sooner had he uttered the words, than the chairman seemed entirely to forget them. His head had been pressed so fiercely against the window cage wire that its mesh was lifting in red lines across his wrinkled brow. He turned back to the scene below.
‘How many times have I said it? Just tell me how many? What do the shareholders expect me to do? We’ll never meet our deadlines if I don’t get an agreement from the workforce. The workforce, you call them? They’re ignoramuses. They don’t even know the meaning of the word. AEG are moving in. They’re just waiting for their chance. Breathing down my neck, by God. And I’m telling you, they’ll do anything to avoid a decent day’s work. What do the shareholders expect me to do? Put the stuff on to the wagons myself? Only look at them now! Believe me, it has to stop. I’d go down myself, but there’s a young man with me here who’s training to be a surgeon. Put me through to Harold immediately. No, a meeting with him, an hour will do, any time early next week. Just now I’m waiting for my operation. An hour is all I need with him to sort this whole mess out once and for all. I’ve been telling him for months. Telefunken are strong. They’ve got something new up their sleeves. But what has Harold ever done about it I’d like to know? Can’t get them back to work either, whatever he tells the country. Just give me an hour with the PM. I’ll make him see sense, let me tell you. Can’t match their delivery dates. All because you scum down there won’t lift a finger, scroungers and yobbos the lot of you. Something for nothing! All they want is something for nothing! Get back to work, why don’t you? This young man I have here with me, he’s got the right idea. He’s going to be a surgeon, a real doctor, not one of your pill-pushers wasting the public’s money. We need more people like him! Yes, just get Wilson on the phone right now. Go to the top, young man. Believe me, it’s the only way. Don’t, whatever you do, get tied up with the secretaries. Tied up with the secretaries! Get back to your posts! Get back to your work places. For God’s sake, why don’t you? They should take my advice, do you hear, young man. Get rid of these foreign pill-pushers. Look at them down there, flat on their backs. Having sex, is it? Is that what they’re up to now?’