I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (3 page)

The gong sounded, the doctor on duty appeared, and the patients flocked after him into the dining-hall. The table places were altered at every meal and each patient's place was marked with a card on which was written his name. The waiters, like well-trained sheepdogs, skilfully manoeuvred the patients towards their chairs. Mr. Bow was glad to find that he was not to sit beside one of the so called hostesses who were spaced round the big table to watch what went on. The patients stood at their places, waiting for the doctor to sit down. The doctor glanced round to make sure that everybody had found the right seat. Then he sat down. It was the signal. The room was full of loud scrapings as the patients pulled back their chairs.

Mr. Bow prepared to sit down with the rest but there was an obstruction; something impeded him. Sanguinelli had slipped quick as an eel between him and his chair. The Italian's eyes, full of malice, writhed like insane tadpoles from side to side.

‘Excuse – my place.’ He pointed towards the name card with a thin yellow finger.

‘No,’ said Thomas Bow, frowning. He was angry. He was tormerited
and persecuted and he would not endure it. He snatched at the back of the chair but Sanguinelli was seated in it already. Everyone was sitting down now except the waiters and Mr. Bow.’

A hostess two places away took charge of the situation. Her hair went in hard, regular waves.

‘This is your seat here, Mr. Bow,’ she said amicably. There was a chair empty beside her.

‘No,’ said the Englishman slowly. ‘No,’ He frowned deeply. ‘My card is here.’

The Italian burst out laughing. He triumphantly displayed the card in front of him on which was written the name Sanguinelli. The hostess looked down and saw that the card next to her was indeed the name card of Thomas Bow.

‘Come along, Mr. Bow. You've made a mistake,’ she said in a firmer tone.

The young man recognized the firmness that was in her voice. He moved obediently and sat down in the empty chair and spread his table napkin widely over his knees as he had been shown how to do. He ate what was put before him, looking carefully at his neighbours to make sure that he used the same knives and forks as they did. All the time he was eating he felt angry and sad and confused. Something had happened which he did not understand. The card with his name had been there, he had seen it distinctly, but when he looked at it again Sanguinelli's name had appeared. Sanguinelli had triumphed over him in front of the whole room and it was unfair. He had heard the laughter go round the table. His heart was full of sorrow and shame. From time to time the Italian boy leaned forward and grinned at him from the stolen place, triumphant because no one had seen him exchange the cards.

After lunch the patients went out into the grounds. Games were organized. Mr. Bow was directed to take part in the simplest game which consisted in throwing large wooden balls at a smaller ball some distance off. Mr. Bow did not understand the game. He did not understand why some of the balls were brown and some black or why one player threw before another. He stood with the large shiny ball in his hand, waiting till he should be told to throw. He
was not thinking about the game. He was thinking about the pigskin belt he was making. It seemed to him that the belt was his friend. Only the feel of the cool leather could assuage the hurt and the anger inside his heart.

The time came for him to make his throw. He held the ball cupped in his hand as he saw the other players do. He aimed conscientiously at the little ball lying out on the grass but his ball disobeyed him and flew far beyond. There was laughter. ‘Champion! Champion!’jeered the Italian voice.

Thomas Bow wandered away from the game. No one noticed him going. He wandered towards the workroom. He held out his hands to the grasses, but now they did not caress his skin like soft fur but pricked sharp as needles. As he walked he hoped very much that the workroom door would be open. It was shut, and blinds were drawn over the windows.

The young man sat down on the step in front of the workroom door. He looked bewildered and worried and very sad. He did not know what to do. It troubled him that the belt was locked away in there. He felt the belt lonely for him as he was for it. He glanced up. A cloud had passed over the sun. He would have liked to share his worry with the cloud but the cloud would not stay. He sat disconsolate on the step staring flatly ahead.

Presently he heard voices and two men came round the corner of the building. One of them was a man who visited the clinic periodically to do X-ray work. The other was a doctor with black hair and a bluish chin. Mr. Bow was afraid of the doctor who for many months had put him into a hideous sleep with his poisoned needle.

‘Hullo, what are you doing here?’ the radiologist asked.

‘I came for my belt,’ he answered. He stood up.

He was afraid of the doctor and wanted to get away in case he should be trapped and put back again into the nightmare sleep.

‘Your belt?’ The other man did not understand.

‘He's doing leather work at occupational therapy. I suppose he's making a belt,’ the doctor explained. He came up to the patient. ‘Don't you know that the workroom's closed in the afternoon?’ he
said to him. ‘It's recreation time now. Get off and join the others,’ He gave him a friendly push. Mr. Bow started back in alarm.

‘I only wanted my belt,’ he said, starling to move away.

The other two watched him go.

‘He doesn't know how lucky he is,’ said the dark doctor. ‘We've pulled him back literally from a living death. That's the sort of thing that encourages one in this work.’

Mr. Bow walked carefully in the sunshine. He did not know how lucky he was and perhaps that was rather lucky as well.

PALACE OF SLEEP

T
HE
wind was blowing like mad in the hospital garden. It seemed to know that it was near a mental hospital, and was showing off some crazy tricks of its own, pouncing first one way and then another, and then apparently in all directions at once. The mad wind sprang out with a bellow from behind a corner of the nurses’ quarters, immediately tearing round the back of the building to meet itself half-way along the front in a double blast that nearly snatched the cap from the head of a sister hurrying towards the entrance. With a clash and a clatter the door swung to admit her indignant figure huddled in its blue cloak. The wind came in too with a malicious gusto that died drearily in the recesses of the hall where the two doctors were talking.

The physician in charge glanced round as if he resented the unceremonious way the wind burst into his hospital. He was a man of about sixty-five, with a red, cheerful face and white hair. Magnanimously passing over the wind's interruption, he went on with the story he was telling.

‘When I went in next morning she was trying to tear up the sheet. So I said to her in a quiet, friendly way, “Don't you think that's rather a silly thing to do?” And she answered me back as quick as lightning, “If I can't do silly things here, I'd like to know where I can do them”.’ The red face creased into a net of jovial lines, the broad shoulders shook with laughter. ‘Pretty smart, wasn't it?’

The young doctor echoed the laugh politely. He was a visitor from the north who was being shown round the hospital. Himself a reticent man, he wished that the superintendent were a little less genial and expansive. So much good-humour aroused in him some disquietude, some slight distrust. He turned his lean, sensitive face, and his eyes rested reflectively on the other for a moment. What they saw was not altogether reassuring. There was something which they found faintly suspect about the appearance of the elderly man. His hair was too white, his face was too genial, his expression
was too optimistic. He looked more like a country parson than a psychiatrist.

The visitor looked at his watch and said tentatively, ‘I'm afraid I haven't much time left. I think you were going to show me the paying block – ?’

‘Yes, yes. The paying block. You must certainly see that before you go. We're very proud of our private wards.’

The swing doors clashed behind the two men, who lowered their heads against the attack of the wind. The wind leaped madly upon them, with malice, with joy, as they walked on the covered way that crossed the impersonal garden. In the empty flower-beds the earth lay saturated and black, the wintry-looking, acid-green grass rippled under the wind, the bare trees lashed their branches complainingly.

The two doctors walked briskly along side by side, the one tall, contemplative, reserved, ‘turned in upon himself against the onslaught of wind, the other with white hair blowing about and a look of determined good-nature which seemed to set the seal of his approval upon the rough weather.

The long brick building felt quiet as a vacuum after the windy tumult outside. The superintendent paused for a moment inside the door, smoothing his beautiful white hair with his fingers. He was slightly breathless.

‘Welcome to the palace of sleep,’ he said with his cheerful smile, speaking and smiling partly for the benefit of a young nurse who was passing by. ‘All the patients in this wing are having partial or prolonged narcosis,’ he went on in a more confidential tone as the girl disappeared through one of the many doors.

The wide corridor was coldly and antiseptically white, with a row of doors on the left and windows on the opposite side. The windows were high and barred, and admitted a discouraging light that gleamed bluishly on the white distemper like a reflection of snow. Some grey rubber composition which deadened sound covered the floor. A hand-rail ran along the wall under the high windows.

One of the doors further down the corridor opened, and a nurse
emerged, supporting a woman in a red dressing-gown. The patient swayed and staggered in spite of the firm grip that guided her hand to the rail. Her head swung loosely from side to side, her wide-open eyes, at once distracted and dull like the eyes of a drunken person, stared out of her pale face, curiously puffy and smooth under dark hair projecting in harsh, disorderly elf-locks. Her feet, clumsy and uncontrolled in their woollen slippers, tripped over the hem of her long nightdress and threw her entire weight on the nurse's supporting arm.

‘Hold up, Topsy,’ the probationer said, in a tolerant, indifferent voice just perceptibly tinged with impatience, speaking as if to an awkward child. She hoisted her companion upright, and the pair continued their laborious progress towards the bathroom, the sick woman stumbling and reeling, and gazing desperately, blankly ahead, the nurse watchful, abstracted, and humming a dance tune under her breath.

‘That patient will finish her treatment in another day or two,’ the physician-in-charge told the visitor. ‘Of course, she won't remember anything that's happened to her during the period of narcosis. She's practically unconscious now, although she can manage to walk after a fashion.’

He continued to discuss technicalities as they moved together along the corridor. The young man listened and answered somewhat mechanically, his eyes troubled, disturbed by what they had seen.

A door opened as the two doctors were passing it, and the redfaced senior paused to speak to the nurse who was coming out, holding an enamel tray covered with a cloth from beneath which emanated the nauseous stench of paraldehyde. He noticed the other man's instinctive recoil, and his face wrinkled into its jolly folds.

‘Don't you like our local perfume, then? We're so used to the smell of P.R. here that we hardly notice it. Some of the patients say they actually get to like it in time.’

They went into the room, which was heavy with the same sickening odour. Under the white bedspread pulled straight and symmetrical, like the covering of a bier, a young woman was lying quite motionless with closed eyes. Her fair hair was spread
on the pillow, her pale face was absolutely lifeless, void, with the peculiar glazed smoothness and eye-sockets darkly circled. The superintendent stood at the bedside looking down at this shape which already seemed to have forfeited humanity and given itself over prematurely to death. His face wore a complacent expression, gratified, approving; the look of a man well satisfied with his work.

‘She won't move now for eight hours, and then she'll come round enough to be washed and fed, and then we'll send her off for another eight-hour snooze.’

The visitor had come close to the bed and was also looking down at its occupant. The vague distress accumulating in his mind crystallized for some reason about this inanimate form which seemed, to his stimulated sensibilities, to be surrounded by an aura of inexpressible suffering.

‘I don't know that I altogether approve of such drastic treatment for psycho-neurotics,’ he was beginning: when suddenly a tremor disturbed the immobility of the anonymous face, the eyelids quivered under their load of shadows. The man watched, fascinated, almost appalled, as, slowly, with intolerable, incalculable effort, the drugged eyes opened and stared straight into his. Was it imagination, or did he perceive in their clouded greyness a look of terror, of wild supplication, of frantic, abysmal appeal?

‘She's not conscious, of course,’ the superintendent remarked in his benevolent voice. ‘That opening of the eyes is purely a reflex. She can't really see us or hear anything we say.’

Smiling, white-headed like a clergyman, he turned and walked across to the open door. The other doctor hesitated for a few seconds in the ill-smelling room, looking down at the patient, held by an obscure reluctance to withdraw his gaze from those unclear eyes. And when he finally moved away he felt uneasy and almost ashamed, and wished that he had not come to visit the hospital.

WHO HAS DESIRED THE SEA

T
HE
late autumn sun came into the ward about two in the afternoon. There wasn't much strength in the sun which was slow in creeping round the edge of the blackout curtains so that it took a long time to reach the bed by the window.

He lay on the bed fully dressed and watched the sun clamber feebly from one empty bed to another all down the ward, rasping the folded dark army blankets with bristles of light. When it had investigated each iron bedstead the sun slipped down and stretched itself on the floor. The floor was polished and shiny, but where the sun lay a film of dust was revealed. Bars of shadow crossed the pale sun on the floor because of the paper strips pasted over the window. He noticed, as he had noticed on previous afternoons, how the horizontal lines looked like the shadows of prison bars. The association was vaguely unpleasant, and a vague uneasiness disturbed his preoccupation. There was no sense in the paper, anyhow, he thought. It wouldn't prevent the glass splintering if a bomb dropped anywhere near.