The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (8 page)

But he knew to his deep disgruntlement that he would shortly have to arise and undertake a sacred and irritating trust. Sacred, because it was godlike, or at least involved gods, and irritating because of the particular god that it involved.
Sneakily, he twitched the curtains at a distance, using nothing but his divine will. He sighed heavily. He needed to think and, what was more, it was time for his morning visit to the bathroom.
He rang for the orderly.
The orderly arrived promptly in his well-pressed loose green tunic, good-morninged cheerfully, and bustled around locating bedroom slippers and dressing-gown. He helped Odin out of bed, which was a little like rolling a stuffed crow out of a box, and escorted him slowly to the bathroom. Odin walked stiffly, like a head hung between two heavy stilts draped in striped Viyella and white towelling. The orderly knew Odin as Mr Odwin, and didn't realise that he was a god, which was something that Odin tended to keep quiet about, and wished that Thor would too.
Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it. It was inappropriate. He seemed unwilling, or unable, or maybe just too stupid to understand or accept...Odin stopped himself. He sensed that he was beginning mentally to rant. He would have to consider calmly what next to do about Thor, and he was on his way to the right place for a good think.
As soon as Odin had completed his stately hobble to the bathroom door, two nurses hurried in and stripped and remade the bed with immense precision, patting down the fresh linen, pulling it taut, turning it and tucking it. One of the nurses, clearly the senior, was plump and matronly, the other younger, darker and more generally bird-like. The newspaper was whisked off the tloor and neatly refolded, the floor was briskly Hoovered, the curtains hooked back, the flowers and the untouched fruit replaced with fresh flowers and fresh fruit that would, like every piece of fruit before them, remain untouched.
When after a little while the old god's morning ablutions had been completed and the bathroom door reopened, the room had been transformed. The actual differences were tiny, of course, but the effect was of a subtle but magical transformation into something cool and fresh. Odin nodded in quiet satisfaction to see it. He made a little show of inspecting the bed, like a monarch inspecting a line of soldiers.
"Is it well tucked?" he asked in his old and whispery voice.
"It is very well tucked, Mr Odwin," said the senior nurse with an obsequious beam.
"Is it neatly turned?" It clearly was. This was merely a ritual.
"Turned very neatly indeed, Mr Odwin," said the nurse, "I supervised the turning down of the sheets myself."
"I'm glad of that, Sister Bailey, very glad," said Odin. "You have a fine eye for a trimly turned fold. It alarms me to know what I shall do without you."
"Well, I'm not about to go anywhere, Mr Odwin," said Sister Bailey, oozing happy reassurance.
"But you won't last for ever, Sister Bailey," said Odin. It was a remark that puzzled Sister Bailey on the times she had heard it, because of its apparent extreme callousness.
"Sure, and none of us lasts for over, Mr Odwin," she said gently as she and the other nurse between them managed the difficult task of lifting Odin back into hed while keeping his dignity intact.
"You're Irish aren't you, Sister Bailey?" he asked, once he was properly settled.
"I am indeed so, Mr Odwin."
"Knew an Irishman once. Finn something. Told me a lot of stuff I didn't need to know. Never told me about the linen. Still know now."
He nodded curtly at this memory and lowered his head stiffly back on to the firmly plumped up pillows and ran the back of his finely freckled hand over the folded-back linen sheet. Quite simply he was in love with linen. Clean, lightly starched, white Irish linen, pressed, folded, tucked - the words themselves were almost a litany of desire for him. In centuries nothing had obsessed him or moved him so much as linen now did. He could not for the life of him understand how he could ever have cared for anything else.
Linen.
And sleep. Sleep and linen. Sle ep in linen. Sleep.
Sister Bailey regarded him with a sort of proprietary fondness. She did not know that he was a god as such, in fact she thought he was probably an old film producer or Nazi war criminal. Certainly he had an accent she couldn't quite place and his careless civility, his natural selfishness and his obsession with personal hygiene spoke of a past that was rich with horrors.
If she could have been transported to where she might see her secretive patient enthroned, warrior father of the wamor Gods of Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is not quite true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of her wits. But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered from the shock of discovering that virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to believe in was true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race particularly needed it to be true any more.
Odin dismissed his medical attendants with a gesture, having first asked for his personal assistant to be found and sent to him once more.
This caused Sister Bailey to tighten her lips just a very little. She did not like Mr Odwin's personal assistant, general factotum, manservant, call him what you will. His eyes were malevolent, he made her jump, and she strongly suspected him of making unspeakabie suggestions to her nurses during their tea breaks.
He had what Sister Bailey supposed was what people meant by an olive complexion, in that it was extraordinarily close to being green. Sister Bailey was convinced that it was not right at all.
She was of course the last person to judge somebody by the colour of their skin - or if not absolutely the last, she had at least done it as recently as yesterday afternoon when an African diplomat had been brought in to have some gallstones removed and she had conceived an instant resentment of him. She didn't like him. She couldn't say exactly what it was she didn't like about him, because she was a nurse, not a taxi-driver, and she wouldn't let her personal feelings show for an instant. She was much too professional, much too good at her job, and treated everyone with a more or less equal efficient and cheerful courtesy, even, she thought - and a profound iciness settled on her at this point - even Mr Rag.
"Mr Rag" was the name of Mr Odwin's personal assistant. There was nothing she could do about it. It was not her place to criticise Mr Odwin's personal arrangements. But if it had been her business, which it wasn't, then she would greatly have preferred it, and not just for herself, but for Mr Odwin's own well-being as well, which was the important thing, if he could have employed someone who didn't give her the absolute heebie-jeebies, that was all.
She thought no more about it, merely went to look for him. She had been relieved to discover when she came on duty this morning that Mr Rag had left the premises the previous night, but had then, with a keen sense of disappointment, spotted him returning about an hour or so ago.
She found him exactly where he was not supposed to be. He was squatting on one of the seats in the visitors' waiting-room wearing what looked horribly like a soiled and discarded doctor's gown that was much too big for him. Not only that, but he was playing a thinly unmusical tune on a sort of pipe that he had obviously carved out of a large disposable hypodermic syringe which he absolutely should not have had.
He glanced up at her with his quick, dancing eyes, grinned and continued to tootle and squeak, only significantly louder.
Sister Bailey ran through in her mind all the things that it was completely pointless to say about either the roat or the syringe, or about him being in the visitors' room frightening, or preparing to frighten, the visitors. She knew she wouldn't be able to stand the air of injured innocence with which he would reply, or the preposterous absurdity of his answers. Her only course was simply to let it pass and just get him away from the room and out of the way as quickly as possible.
"Mr Odwin would like to see you," she said. She tried to jam some of her normal lilting quality into her voice, but it just wouldn't go. She wished his eyes would stop dancing like that. Apart from finding it highly disturbing from both a medical and aesthetic point of view she also could not help but be piqued by the impression it conveyed that there were at least thirty-seven things in the room more interesting than her.
He gazed at her in this disconcerting manner for a few seconds then, muttering that there was no peace for the wicked, not even the extremely wicked, he pushed past Sister Bailey and skedaddled up the corridor to receive instructions from his lord and master, quickly, before his lord and master fell asleep.
Chapter 8
By the end of the morning Kate had discharged herself from hospital. There were some initial difficulties involved in this because first the ward sister and then the doctor in charge of Kate's case were adamant that she was in no fit state to leave. She had only just emerged from a minor coma and she needed care, she needed -
"Pizza - " insisted Kate.
- rest, she needed -
"- my own home, and fresh air. The air in here is horrible. It smells like a vacuum cleaner's armpit."
- further medication, and should definitely remain under observation for another day or so until they were satisfied that she had made a full recovery.
At least, they were fairly adamant. During the course of the morning Kate demanded and got a telephone and started trying to order pizza to be delivered to her ward. She phoned around all of the least co-operative pizza restaurants she knew in London, harangued them, then made some noisily unsuccessful attempts to muster a motorbike to roam around the West End and try and pick up for her an American Hot with a list of additional peppers and mushrooms and cheeses which the controller of the courier service refused even to attempt to remember, and after an hour or so of this sort of behaviour the objections to Kate discharging herself from the hospital gradually fell away like petals from an autumn rose.
And so, a little after lunchtime, she was standing on a bleak West London street feeling weak and shaky but in charge of herself. She had with her the empty, tattered remains of the garment bag which she had refused to relinquish, and also a small scrap of paper in her purse, which had a single name scribbled on it.
She hailed a taxi and sat in the back with her eyes closed most of the way back to her home in Primrose Hill. She climbed up the stairs and let herself into her top-tloor flat. There were ten messages on her answering machine, which she simply erased without listening to.
She threw open the window in her bedroom and for a moment or two leaned out of it at the rather dangerous and awkward angle which allowed her to see a patch of the park. It was a small comer patch, with just a couple of plane trees standing in it. The backs of some of the intervening houses framed it, or rather, just failed totally to obscure it, and made it very personal and private to Kate in a way which a vast, sweeping vista would not have been.
On one occasion she had gone to this corner of the park and walked around the invisible perimeter that marked out the limits of what she could see, and had come very close to feeling that this was her own domain. She had even patted the plane trees in a proprietorial sort of way, and had then sat beneath them watching the sun going down over London - over its badly spoiled skyline and its non-delivering pizza restaurants - and had come away with a profound sense of something or other, though she wasn't quite certain what. Still, she had told herself, these days she should feel grateful for a profound sense of anything at all, however unspecific.
She hauled herself in from the window, left it wide open in spite of the chill of the outside air, padded through into the small bathroom and ran the bath. It was a bath of the sprawling Edwardian type which took up a wonderfully disproportionate amount of the space available, and encompassed most of the rest of the room with cream-painted pipes. The taps seethed. As soon as the room was sufficiently full of steam to be warm, Kate undressed and then went and opened the large bathroom cupboard.
She felt faintly embarrassed by the sheer profusion of things she had for putting in baths, but she was for some reason incapable of passing any chemist or herb shop without going in to be seduced by some glass-stoppered bottle of something blue or green or orange and oily that was supposed to restore the natural balance of some vague substance she didn't even know she was supposed to have in her pores.
She paused, trying to choose.
Something pink? Something with extra Vitamin B? Vitamin B12? B13? Just the number of things with different types of Vitamin B in them was an embarrassment of choice in itself. There were powders as well as oils, tubes of gel, even packets of some kind of pungent smelling seed that was meant to be good for some obscure part of you in some arcane way.
How about some of the green crystals? One day, she had told herself in the past, she would not even bother trying to choose, but would simply put a bit of everything in. When she really felt in need of it. She rather thought that today was the day, and with a sudden reviving rush of pleasure she set about puaing a drop or two of everything in the cupboard into the seething bath until it was confused with mingling, muddying colours and verging on the glutinous to touch.
She turned off the taps, went to her handbag for a moment, then returned and lowered herself into the bath, where she lay with her eyes closed, breathing slowly for fully three minutes before at last turning her attention to the scrap of paper she had brought with her from the hospital.
It had one word on it, and it was a word she had dragged out of an oddly reluctant young nurse who had taken her temperature that morning.
Kate had questioned her about the big man. The big man whom she had encountered at the airport, whose body she had seen in a nearby side ward in the early hours of the night.
"Oh no," the nurse had said, "he wasn't dead. He was just in some sort of coma."
Could she see him? Kate had asked. What was his name?
She had tried to ask idly, in passing as it were, which was a difficult trick to pull off with a thermometer in her mouth, and she wasn't at all certain she had succeeded. The nurse had said that she couldn't really say, she wasn't really meant to talk about other patients. And anyway, the man wasn't there any more, he had been taken somewhere else. They had sent an ambulance to collect him and take him somewhere else.