The Facts of Life (24 page)

‘Come on,’ she sobbed, manoeuvring his arms about her neck. ‘Try to hold on. Try.
Please
, Edward!’

He made an effort to lock his hands behind her neck, failed with a small, boyish gasp, then hooked an elbow around instead. Trickles of his blood running down inside her petticoat and soaking into her bra, his breath – still sweet with breakfast coffee – warm against her shoulder, she managed to slide him out on to the landing. Half-pushing, half-swinging him along like some grotesque carnival puppet, she dragged him to the locked bedroom and laid him on the floor while she dashed inside for her medical bag. She began to thread a surgical needle, froze for a moment in indecision, then sprinted down to the telephone to call an ambulance first.

‘There’s severe blood loss,’ she warned, and the maddeningly calm voice at the other end asked for his blood group, which she didn’t know.

Edward passed out half-way through her stitching his first wrist. Somehow this made it easier for her. Silent, immobile, he seemed less human. She avoided looking at his face, concentrating her furious gaze on the few inches of outraged skin beneath her working fingers. In the bedroom behind her, Miriam began to cry, working herself up into tiny mountains of rage. As Sally stitched feverishly on, stopping from time to time to rub her hands free of blood and sweat on her skirt, the baby seemed to express with an almost operatic fervour the anguish her mother dared not voice.

She saved his life. Later, much later, when a hospital car dropped her and Miriam off, she found that word of the crisis had spread. Local women friends had been in and cleaned every trace of congealing blood from the bathroom. The landing floorboards had been scrubbed with carbolic, the towels and bathmat boiled and hung out to dry alongside the nappies. The offending blade had been set back inside the razor which had then been tidied thoughtfully away between the toothbrushes. There was a small steak and kidney pie on the kitchen table. Standing there with an overcoat and her scarf thrown on to hide her brown-stained petticoat and bra, Sally felt the irrational shame of a refugee plucked from the scene of undiscussable atrocities.

She fed Miriam, wolfed half the pie cold, straight from the dish, washed it down with a whisky then lay on the sofa with Miriam in her arms, following her into a profound and dreamless sleep. It was dark when the baby woke her again. She rang the hospital to check on Edward and heard that he was sedated and sleeping. She started to ring her parents then checked herself. She thought for a moment, glared at her watch, and called Thomas instead.

Sally swung the Morris off the road between the high walls. The porter recognised her as a regular visitor – the place had few enough of these – and waved her through.

‘Thomas,’ she began. ‘This is so kind of you.’

Thomas pointed out a parking space in the crowded car park.

‘Don’t be an ass,’ he said.

‘I don’t think I could have faced it on my own today.’ Sally sensed that, as ever, her sincerity unsettled him. He was fiddling with the doorhandle, waiting for her to release him. ‘Unto the breach, then,’ she sighed and they opened their doors.

Every dark red brick in Rexbridge Psychiatric Hospital betrayed the fact that it had once been called an asylum. Or worse. It was as though, building for so many blind people, the architect had produced an edifice devoid of the details that humanised such utilitarian structures. There were no fanciful touches. The best efforts of the hospital’s gardener, who had produced the usual expanses of lawn, rosebed and gloomy shrubbery, did little to mask the joyless brutality of the place. Sally was inured to institutions and had visited this one many times already since Edward’s transfer from the general hospital, but she could not help stiffening as they turned from the car towards the entrance. Thomas touched her elbow briefly, in reassurance – or perhaps to reassure himself – and let out a nervous cough.

There were no bars, but the ward’s windows only opened at the top, well out of reach, and to leave by its double set of doors, one had to pass by a muscular, all-seeing duty nurse at a raised desk. Sally also knew that, as in the old isolation hospital, all personal belongings and clothes were surrendered to the nurses’ safekeeping on arrival so that even if anyone did escape, their ill-tailored, hospital-issue pyjamas would brand them a patient not a person. These were the sick, the threatening, the embarrassing, the tidied-away, the impossible. Once again Edward was one of them.

This was not some low-grade Hollywood shocker, however. There were no wide-eyed ravers, no dismal chatterers and her feminine presence caused no lustful commotion. Sally and Thomas might have been shadows for all the interest their arrival caused and the faces they passed were not frightening, just ineffably sad. Two men played cards in slow motion. A third sat staring at a blank point on the lemon yellow wall, trying on expressions as a frivolous shopper with time on her hands might experiment with hats.

Edward sat limply in a chair beside his carefully made bed. There were now glistening scars on his wrists where Sally’s stitches had been taken out. He mournfully returned her kiss but the gesture seemed unfelt, automatic as sneezing or catching a ball. She hugged him, then, feeling tears begin to prick her eyes, busied herself picking the dead flowers from a metal vase and replacing them with some she had picked in the garden earlier. The petals were still wet with dew. Thomas fetched two more chairs and the three of them sat in a cramped circle.

Sally found herself prattling on about the garden, Miriam’s emerging teeth and tastes in food, and her attempt to redecorate one of the spare rooms as a nursery. She tried in vain to elicit from him whether he thought a design of ducks more suitable for a frieze, or one of flowers. Then she passed on encouraging messages from the studio.

‘Jerry says they’re missing you. Apparently the music Wexel wrote for the Falstaff film is all wrong and they’ve had to commission yet another composer. They’re way over budget and about a month behind schedule. But you know how Jerry likes to moan. And he says even Myra Toye’s been asking after you, or Myra St Teath as she must be by now. I read all about her wedding in a silly magazine Mum brought over. She thought you might like it but I forgot to bring it in …’ She ran out of words and cleared her throat nervously. After a pause, Thomas asked the question she had been skirting.

‘So. How are you feeling, Edward?’

Edward shrugged.

‘Oh. All right,’ he said, which was patently untrue. His hair was too long but he made no attempt to brush it from his eyes. His voice, robbed of animation, was little more than a stage whisper. He gulped heavily as though the very action of speaking had caused him pain. Sally made a mental note to check what levels of medication he was being kept on.

‘Let me get you another book,’ she said, reaching for the copy of
Our Mutual Friend
which seemed to have been on his bedside table for weeks. ‘This must be driving you mad.’

He smiled faintly, perhaps at the unintentional clumsiness in her choice of words, and picked the book up to hold it in his lap like a pet.

‘No,’ he said, quieter than ever. ‘I’m still reading it. Off and on. It – takes me out of myself.’

The effort of producing such a long sentence seemed to exhaust him. He was saved from speaking further by the arrival of a nurse at Sally’s elbow.

‘Dr Waltham will see you now,’ he said. ‘Do you know the way?’

Sally turned, puzzled.

‘Dr Waltham? I thought Dr Caldecott –’

‘He’s away on a conference. Dr Waltham is taking over his patients in the meanwhile.’

Sally had not seen Dr Waltham since their awkward meeting long before, when he had caught her and Edward kissing in the bookshop. She muttered this to Thomas as they walked along the corridor to his office.

‘I doubt whether anyone has ever kissed Ernest Waltham since he was out of nappies,’ Thomas said. ‘And even then, one suspects he lacked a mother’s love.’

If Waltham remembered the incident, the memory was adding to the piquancy of the encounter, lending it the quality – pleasing to him, no doubt – of the grim, told-you-so climax of a cautionary tale.

‘To be frank with you,’ he told her, once the social niceties were out of the way, ‘I believe we need to try something stronger than the drugs.’

‘Stronger?’ Sally objected, thinking of how vague Edward was already. ‘But surely –?’

‘All they can do is maintain him in his present state which, as you’ve just seen for yourself, is scarcely satisfactory. It’s been first aid, so far, little more than that. But if we are to proceed with electro-convulsive therapy, we shall need your signed permission.’

‘
No!
’

Dr Waltham registered glassy surprise.

‘Your reaction seems remarkably vehement.’

Sally glanced to Thomas, seeking his support.

‘There’s no proof that ECT works,’ she told him.

‘On the contrary –’

‘Thomas they want to electrocute him!’

‘Now really, Miss Banks.’

‘It’s Dr,’ she said, ‘and my name is Pepper now.’

‘Of course. Forgive me. Now really you must see that we have little option. A patient has been entrusted to us for curing to the best of our ability.’ He pushed a form of consent across the desktop to her. ‘With the most developed of our techniques.’

‘Yes but
you
must see!’ Sally gasped, pushing back her chair to stand. Thomas glanced from her to Waltham, unsure. ‘You must see you’re asking me to allow you to try out a technique nobody really understands. ECT’s hardly comparable with medication. You’re asking me to let you fry his brains.’

‘Now
really
.’

‘Yes you are. Effectively. I want him well, himself, not permanently addled.’

‘Which is precisely why ECT is the answer. In some depressive cases it has a remarkably stimulating effect.’

‘Well of course it’s stimulating, sticking that kind of voltage through the most finely-tuned organ in the body! The organ we know the least about! And what about the
other
depressive cases? For pity’s sake, Thomas, say something.’

Thomas opened and shut his mouth, clearly worried but just as clearly at a loss for words.

‘He’s a composer, not a bricklayer,’ she pursued, exasperated, turning back to Waltham. ‘What happens if you do this to him and he can’t read music any more? Hmm?’

‘What happens if we
don’t
do this to him?’ Waltham countered. ‘He vegetates. He becomes institutionalised. Precious little difference between a bricklayer and Beethoven then. What you’re suggesting is highly unlikely in any case.’

‘But possible.’

‘Well …’

‘Why else would you need my consent?’

‘There’s always an element of risk, as in any surgical operation.’

‘How great a risk?’ Thomas asked at last.

‘Minimal,’ Waltham told him, relieved to have a man to deal with.

‘And there’s no other option?’ Thomas asked.

‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘He could come home with me. Now.’

‘With all due respect,’ Waltham said, showing her none, ‘it was in
your
care, Doctor, that he nearly succeeded in killing himself.’

‘How dare you!’ Sally said, but the fight was leaving her and she sank back into her chair. Thomas rebuked Waltham.

‘That was hardly necessary,’ he said, then caught Sally’s eye and said in a kinder tone, ‘I hate to say this, dear girl, but –’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You’re not the specialist here.’

‘No,’ she sighed. ‘No. I’m just the wife.’

She reached for the form and tried to read it but her eyes were merely scanning the words and the legalistic sentences assumed no meaning for her.

‘How many times will you have to – do it to him?’ she asked, picturing electrodes, teeth clamped hard on a plastic bit, pyjamas loose around convulsion-wracked limbs.

‘Once a week for a trial period.’ Waltham’s tone was warmer, almost seductive, as he sniffed approaching surrender. She looked up and he held out a pen. ‘We may not know precisely why it works,’ he added, ‘but it’s not as though these things aren’t done under strict clinical conditions. He’ll be under constant observation. The treatment will be closely monitored. Any changes, good or bad, will be recorded and acted upon.’

‘Yes yes,’ she said, impatient now, and she took the pen.

She paused, searching his face for something she could trust. Would she, she wondered, react so emotively if the patient in question were but a patient. She looked from Waltham back to Thomas. He set his jaw and gave a barely perceptible nod. He was urging her to be brave.

As she signed, she felt both men subside into their chairs slightly with relief. For a moment it was as though it were she, the troublesome wife, and not Edward, who was being handed over to have an errant mind brought crudely to heel.

The little boat which ferried them out from the Dorset coast was filled with visiting relatives. It was Corry’s annual Visitor’s Day, an opportunity for dominant culture briefly to assert its mob superiority over the eccentric. Only one couple – a comfortable parson and his harassed-looking wife, whose nervous hands strayed repeatedly to touch the silver cross round her neck, as though even such plain adornment were too ostentatious – seemed likely family for a nun. The others – parents, married sisters, grown-up children – were stirring up the kind of camaraderie among themselves that implied a shared adversity. The way they brightly swopped holiday plans and public gossip with strangers was a way of making plain to one another that nuns, for them, represented the outmoded and unnatural. The women they were visiting on Corry – their daughters, sisters, mothers, whatever – had turned their back on everything these, their survivors, represented, on family, procreation, domesticity, social achievement. The facts of life, in short. The colourful boatload, with its potted plants, knitting, family snaps, tins of cake and chatter of politics and film stars, was a worldly, see-what-you-missed delegation. Women were wearing their prettiest dresses in much the same way that Sally persisted in carrying armfuls of flowers from The Roundel’s garden to adorn Edward’s hospital ward – behind the cheering display nestled a small thorn, an unconscious sting, to remind the visited of their rightful place.