Len was one of the Guardians (that was what, male or female, I used to call them, giving them a capital letter in my mind). He was young and, since his lard-coloured body was huge, one might have supposed that during those years of War he would have been in the forces. But he had what he called ‘my condition’, necessitating that he inject himself each day with insulin. Once, entering what I thought was the deserted assembly room, I found him lying on his side, his buttocks and legs on the dais and his head and torso on the floor below it. I concluded with satisfaction: Well, he’s dead, and left him there, for someone else to find. Someone-else, his wife, who worked in the kitchens, did find him; but he wasn’t dead, he was merely in a coma.
Len would lean over my armchair or he would squat beside it. ‘How are we, Merv?’ No one else had ever called me anything other than Mervyn. ‘How are we today then? Aren’t we going to say something? Come on, Merv! Speak to me! Say something! I’m your pal!’ But I never said anything to anyone. That silence of mine tantalised him and even drove him to frenzy. He was like a small child with a jar of sweets or a money box that he was unable to open. Once, enraged, he slapped me across the back of my head, the small child hurling the jar or money box to the floor. ‘You bloody well answer when you’re spoken to!’ he shouted at me. I merely blinked at him, my eyes watering from the violent blow. Then he put a hand, tattooed with a swallow (could it be that he had once done bird?), on to the back of my neck and gently stroked it. ‘Sorry about that, Merv. But you can be terribly irritating, you know. A real pain.’
All day, except when summoned to meals, I used to sit in that armchair and stare at the garden. Because of a wartime shortage of staff, it was overgrown, a few rose-beds excepted. Was it always overcast or raining or did I, because of my illness, imagine that? I can still see the laurels glistening. I can still even hear the rain-drops lisping off them. Perhaps my illness, which the psychiatrists constantly argued about, induced in me a hyperaesthesia. How otherwise could I have heard those drops when I was separated from them by thick panes of glass?
I had seen Noreen on a number of occasions, but without any interest. I did not then know that she had been released from the ATS (she had been working in camouflage) because her mother was dead and her elderly father was dying; or that, twice each week, she gave art classes which any of the inmates could attend. No doubt Dr Unwin or Dr Lazarides had mentioned the classes to me, suggesting that they might be of benefit to me. No doubt Len had urged me: ‘Why don’t you attend one of these art classes, Merv? Could give you an interest.’ But those were days when I took nothing in.
Noreen was larger and more upright than she is now. Thirty-three years old, she had the ruddy complexion and the sturdy physique of the farm girl that once she had been. Her hands were big and capable, and she wore her thick, straight blonde hair parted in the middle and caught up at each side by a tortoiseshell clasp shaped like a butterfly. She had been at the Slade and had had a single picture, of harvesting on the farm below a thunderous sky, accepted by the Academy in 1938. Whenever she hurried through the living-room to the art room beyond it, she would look over to me, as I sat in ‘ my’ armchair (by now, every other inmate knew that it was mine and made no effort to usurp it), staring out of the window. But I would pretend to be totally unaware of her. In fact, for most of the time I was totally unaware of her.
Then, one day, instead of clattering in her lumpy, flat-heeled shoes straight over the worn linoleum to the door to the art room, she veered towards me. ‘Come on!’ she said briskly. ‘Join us! You don’t want to sit there mooning day after day.’
I made no answer. I continued to stare out of the window.
‘Oh come on!’
Many people had said, in effect, ‘Come on!’ to me, and I had ignored all of them. Why did I not ignore her? Was it some prescience, a leap of the mind into the future in place of its constant dawdling in the past, so that I knew, knew at once, that here was my rescuer and that, if I seized my opportunity, somehow, at some time, I should escape from the Black Box?
That first day she gave me some glitterwax to model, and from it I made for her – yes, it was for her, not for myself – a rose with stiff pink and white petals, smelling vaguely of paraffin. ‘Well done!’ she told me. ‘I think you’ve got a talent. A real talent.’ I had heard her say the same thing or something like it to many of the other people also at work. But nonetheless I was delighted.
Every Tuesday and every Friday morning I used to wake in a state of expectation and happiness. She was coming, there would be a class. I still did not speak, to her or to anyone else. But when I saw her, I would give her a smile, such as I gave to no one else. ‘You have the most wonderful smile in the world,’ she was later to tell me. When she once opened her desk while I was standing by it, I noticed, with rare pleasure, that there, among the crayons and tubes of paint and scraps of paper, was my glitterwax rose.
When I at last spoke, I surprised myself as much as her.
All that week snow had been falling, smothering the laurels and lying thick on the garden paths. In the art room she wore her tweed overcoat and the tip of her nose was blue. In those days I myself was impervious to both cold and heat. I was never aware of the temperature, often prompting Len to fuss over me – I should put on a pullover, it was perishing; or why didn’t I take my jacket off, I’d be boiled to death?
Noreen came over to me at the work table where I was moulding another lump of glitterwax. ‘I think you’ve progressed beyond that,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you try some painting? It could be more fun. It’ll stretch you more. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
It was only a monosyllable. But it was, literally, the first word which I had spoken since I had entered the Black Box. Had she realised that? I asked her much later, for her to answer that yes, she had realised it, and then to add, in a puzzled tone: ‘And, you know, I knew, I just knew as soon as I’d put the question, that, after so often refusing to answer me, you were going to answer me then.’
Yes.
It was a Yes to her, to myself, above all to life.
That was when she first fitted the key into the lock on the Black Box. The opening of the lid would come much later, long after the War was over. But that was when my deliverance was first put in train.