Paul offered her sugar. She hesitated. Then she licked the tip of a finger
and dipped into the white mound, withdrawing just enough to taste.
-- Not so crazy, that, on the assumption that she literally doesn't know
what we're giving her. But
that's
crazy.
He showed her what the sugar was for, spooning some into his own cup,
and added milk from the bottle the nurse had brought.
-- Why the hell didn't the kitchen send up a jug? Kitchen? No, of course
not. Not at this time of night. Christ, it's past ten o'clock.
And on the realisation, heard the familiar gurgle of the plumbing as it
coped with the staff-supervised evacuations of the patients preliminary
to their bedding down.
-- What else doesn't she know about? Toilets, maybe?
Tea, excessively spiked with milk, sweetened, she sipped and eventually
drank down. They all three watched her intently. Abruptly Paul realised
they were doing something he normally objected to in principle: treating
a patient as a thing instead of a person.
-- Simply because I can't talk to her. Hmmm . . .
He turned to Natalie with an exclamation. "Chuck over a notepad and a
pencil, will you? Let's try and get her to write something down."
-- Is she going to have to have this explained too? No, thank goodness.
With something approaching briskness, the girl set aside her empty cup and
took the pencil and paper. She examined the point of the former and made
a tentative mark with it as if to be sure that was the way it worked,
then wrote quickly. Paul noted that she was right-handed but preferred
the rare, though not remarkable, grip between index and middle fingers.
She showed him the result, saying at the same time, "Arrzheen!"
He found confronting him four symbols like a child's incomplete sketch
for two Christmas trees, a fishhook and an inverted spear.
*8*
All the way home Paul kept shivering, although the car's heater was
switched on full.
-- The way hope seemed to leak out of the girl's face when she realised
I didn't understand what she'd written down. My imaginary terrors have
come to life in her; she's stranded in a world where nobody can speak
to her and nobody knows who she is!
-- The curious greedy "ah-hah, they're locking you up too" expressions
of the patients as we took her through the dormitory to her cell. Maybe I
should have experienced that instead of being protected and isolated. But
it would probably have broken me into little bits.
-- She can't be under any illusions about where she's wound up. Things
may baffle her but people she does appear to understand. Packed in head
to foot to head in what were once fine stately rooms but now stark with
chipped plaster, faded ugly paint, bars at the windows and locks on
the doors.
The keys in his pocket jingled, not audibly but in memory.
-- And I told Natalie this afternoon we had eighteen free bed-spaces.
Whose word am I taking for that? Every ward so crammed we only have room
for a poky little locker too small to hold a kid's toys alongside each
bed. Anything too much or too numerous for the locker to hold: taken and
shut away. How do people reassure themselves of identity? Belongings,
possessions, mementoes: the solid proof that memory doesn't lie. And
bit by bit we chip away the mortar of their lives. Christ, how did I
ever wander into psychiatry for a living?
The lamp-post standard outside his home appeared around a bend, and he
slowed. There was no need to get out in the rain and unfasten the gate;
he'd left it open this morning.
-- And that's something Iris won't let me do when she's here. Being with
Iris has turned into an endless series of-having to get out in the rain
because an open gate "looks bad." And might let dogs into the garden.
He halted the car and switched it off. As darkness rushed in, so
did fatigue, and he sat thinking along the same lines for another few
minutes. This car was a Triumph Spitfire, not because Iris hadn't had cash
for something more ambitious but because the car she originally chose
was four inches too long for the gate to be closed behind it and there
was only a narrow verge -- no pavement across which it could have been
rehung to open outwards. Moreover, fitting a modern gate that folded by
sections would mean sacrificing the present one of stout oaken bars which
the daily woman warranted to have been made by a joiner in Blickham with
such a reputation that antique dealers from London brought him valuable
furniture to restore.
-- Funny how one thing leads to another. Suppose the man who made our
gate when he was an apprentice had dropped dead before becoming famous;
no prestige would attach to it and we could throw it away. . . . I wish
to God the events which culminated in Paul Fidler had followed another
course.
He ordered himself out of the car, mind buzzing with conflicting visions
of the way his life might have turned out: if he'd chosen another career
than medicine, if his breakdown had been permanent, if he'd failed to get
the job here at Chent.
-- Why can I never visualise things turning out better as clearly as
I can visualise the catastrophes I scraped past by a hair?
"Everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds!" Hah!
Key poised to let himself in, he hesitated and scanned the house's façade
by the light of the nearby street-lamp.
-- Façade is the right word and no mistake. How pleased I was when Iris
fell in love with it and decided a couple of years at Chent wouldn't
be as bad as all that. And it's much worse. Behind the façades -- the
house's and mine -- rot, woodworm, death-watch beetle.
He slammed the door and made the windows rattle.
There was nothing very special about the house in this part of England.
It was inarguably handsome to look at, with its black-and-white
half-timbering. On the inside, though . . .
He'd driven up from London on his own to be interviewed at Chent,
and when that was over he was ninety per cent certain he'd got the
job. He needed it; his original idea of sticking as close as possible
to a London teaching hospital was foundering because -- to Iris --
progress was dismayingly slow in the fiercely competitive atmosphere
of the capital. Yet he knew as soon as he set eyes on Yemble that she'd
dislike living there with equal intensity.
On the one hand: being appointed psychiatric registrar at Chent was
going to save him a year on the promotion ladder and make up for that
other year lost beyond recall, the one Iris had not so far learned about.
-- Bloody fool. I really am a bloody fool.
On the other hand: Yemble was being absorbed into the drab town of
Blickham, whose single claim to distinction was an Elizabethan town-hall
sandwiched between a garage and the public baths. Eight miles away,
Cornminster -- charming, largely unspoiled, but offering what to a wealthy
attractive girl used to London? A twice-weekly change of programme at
the Lido Picture Palace and advertisements for the Cornminster Madrigal
Fellowship painted in water-colours by the conductor's teenage daughter.
Trying to pluck up the courage to tell Iris that he was going to take
the post at Chent whether she liked it or not, he'd driven for what
seemed like an eternity along each successive one of the roads leading
out of Yemble. Then, the car had been a second-hand Ford; Iris's father
was dead less than a month and though she was entitled to draw on the
money he'd left her she had felt it somehow in bad taste.
The moment he saw this house, with the estate agent's board outside
offering it for sale, everything fell into place. At nine that night he
parried Iris's anger with a bunch of flowers and a picture of the house,
and next weekend they drove up to look at it.
He was only marginally guilty about depicting the house as something
exceptional. As he'd discovered during his tour of the district,
Cornminster boasted twenty similar, and even depressing Blickham preserved
a few. But he'd banked on her unfamiliarity with the west country,
and the trap closed as expected.
-- Darling, how clever of you! All these magnificent oak beams! And
leaded windows! It's like walking back into history! And it's so cheap!
While he kept silent about the drawbacks of windows that called for lights
to be switched on in daytime and the kitchen doorway which bumped his head
and the chimneys that poured half the heat of the fire straight up into
nowhere.
-- The television could go in that recess but we'd have to get a stand
more in keeping with the room like an antique chest perhaps and we can sit
and watch it and listen to the logs crackling. . . . Darling, you are sure
about this job? I mean, I wouldn't want you to take it just to please me.
Hanging up his clammy coat, Paul snorted at the memory.
-- The jargon of status has rubbed off on her, all right. The word
"consultant" has a kind of magic to her ears. How soon will I be one,
how long O Lord how long? Better have something to eat before I turn in
or I'll wake in the night and have to botch up a snack in a daze. Phil
Kerans thinks I'm living out in luxury. He should have to stagger through
this room at three in the morning in pyjamas with the wind howling down
that bloody chimney.
There was nothing to drink but some wine in a recorked bottle, probably
meant for cooking. Iris was a cookery snob given to paella and souffles
which didn't quite succeed, but half the time she couldn't be bothered
and either opened cans or suggested going out. On a registrar's salary
he preferred cans.
Carving a doorstep off a brown loaf, pricking sausages, fetching an egg
from the refrigerator, he had most of his mind spare to ramble on.
-- Deceived by appearances, that's my wife. With me as much as the house.
Slam down the money out of Dad's -- sorry:
Daddy's
estate, full of
plans for a pink matched bathroom suite with shower; then when they
ran the pipes and exposed the fabric, the smell of dry rot pungent
as smoke. I'd rather she blamed me instead of rowing with the estate
agent. Best of all herself: "Surveyor? But this is the only possible
place for us to live while you're at Chent!"
Despite his forking it, one of the sausages burst and began to ooze
obscenely out of its skin.
-- Bloody hell, Mirza's right, isn't he?
He went to pour a large glass of the stale wine, hoping the beer and
whisky had progressed far enough through his system not to wish a hangover
on him from incautious mixing. He paused in the living-room and stared
about him, remembering the awful evening when he'd brought the Pakistani
home for drinks.
-- Where do they acquire that art of making unwelcome visitors feel small
without actually insulting them? Bred into them by their nannies. Must be.
And afterwards: "Darling, I do appreciate that you have to be on good terms
with your colleagues, but surely an immigrant like your friend won't be
staying in England? He'll be going back to his own country?" Glossing it:
"Steer clear of the wogs and butter up the bosses!"
-- Keeps wondering why I don't invite the
medical superintendent
(hushed, awe). Because I can't stand the bastard, is all.
He sent the egg to keep the sausages company in the pan.
-- That girl tonight with her air of total disorientation . . . What in
hell do I really know about women? "A marriage like yours is no basis for
a proper understanding" -- damn Mirza for having more insight than I'll
accumulate by ninety. But I do know why Iris married me and I'm lying
to myself when I pretend I don't. Bright young medical student just that
significant step below her on the social ladder which promised she could
dictate the course of his career and see him grateful for it but not
beyond hope because witness all those scholarships and ambitious parents
aware of their place but pushing their boy from behind: hence, he's used
to being pushed. I should have sheered off when she tried to argue me into
general practice (Harley Street, a fortune from hypochondriacs dazzled by
the chauffeured Rolls) instead of countering with persuasive statements
about psychiatry the wide-open field and her first introduction to the
idea of a CONSULTANT looked up to by hospital staff . . .
The burst sausage had caught on the pan and was burning. Hastily he
scooped the food on to a plate and turned off the stove. He checked his
next motion and addressed the air.
"God damn it, anyone else I can get away from, but myself I have to live
with till I die! I did go crazy from overwork after two years' studying
medicine and nothing can change that. I did have to waste twelve months
drugged up to the eyeballs and staring at the garden and going twice a
week to see that halfwitted dyed-in-the-wool Freudian bastard Schroff!
And I bloody well ought to have been put in a bin like Chent so I'd
remember I'm as fragile as they are!"