The Doctor Is Sick Read online

  Indeed very sad. Vicariously sad, though. The man who had overcome tobacco addiction was universally congratulated. Was this other, though involuntary, loss of an appetite of a very different order? Yes, because, despite Barrier's whimsy, nicotine was not a lady. A lady was not nicotine. One's wife was not a packet of Senior Service. It was, therefore, vicariously sad.

  Edwin stared, though now unseeing, at a nude named (why the quotation marks? he had wondered) 'Felicity'. He thought not of felicity but of fidelity. He and Sheila had long ago agreed that sexual infidelity was not really infidelity at all. You could accept a drink or a cigarette from somebody, why not also an hour or two in bed? It was the same sort of thing. Even when she had not been able, for some obscure reason of fancy, to reciprocate a friend's or stranger's desire for her body, she had always been willing to lie still, be the passive food for that appetite, 'Ca vous donne tant de plaisir et moi si peu de peine.' A favourite slogan of hers. The real infidelity, according to her, should draw to itself total and ultimate condemnation, unforgivable, the sin against the Holy Ghost. To prefer just to be with somebody else, to engage of one's own free will in spiritual intimacy with another, that was true adultery.

  It had been easy enough to accept this view of morality with one's brain, thought Edwin. It was when promiscuity changed from a concept to a percept that trouble began. Curious how women, so irrational, could exalt reason, could be genuinely puzzled that even a doctor of philosophy should want to bring out a knife when he actually saw, actually heard. Edwin had actually seen, actually heard, only once, and that had been fairly recently, in a hotel in Moulmein. Sheila had sweetly forgiven his rage; after all, the failure of his libido had already taken place; he was not quite normal.

  What Edwin now feared was that his marriage would fail completely because choice had been taken away from her, her right to choose between his bed and all the others in the world. She needed a base from which to conduct her forays; she might now, without deliberately searching for it, find a new one. Edwin did not believe that anyone in any hospital, neurologist or psychiatrist, could put anything fundamental right. The libido had failed for good; the latest phase of one's personality must always be the final phase; he wanted to ensure that he never fell down unexpectedly again while lecturing on folk etymology, but if he smelt cloves as peppermint who was to say that he was wrong? And though he worried vicariously about the end of his sex-life, the test of the durability of his marriage must surely be taken on this very issue. Some day, all marriages had to become sexless, but then they usually had more than fifteen years to look back on. Thirty-eight was (Charlie had been right in his estimate) much too young to pack all those instruments away.

  The sneerer next to Edwin was already asleep, toiling hard in it. At intervals he would announce a football result, the scores fantastic.

  He really preferred, Edwin decided, being worried over the loss of sexual desire to being cured of this loss by people like Dr Railton. He knew this was unreasonable and ungrateful, but he felt that, in feeling that, his right to choose was being vindicated. Then he remembered that it was this very right to choose that was being denied Sheila. He was very confused. Then, into the darkened ward with its few burning bedlamps, tiptoed Dr Railton, as if to come and resolve the confusion. Dr Railton smiled. He said:

  'I'm glad you're not asleep yet, Mr Spindrift. There are just one or two little things----'

  'We'd better get this business straight,' said Edwin. 'This business of honorifics. I'm Doctor Spindrift.'

  'Doctor?' Dr Railton looked wary: delusions of grandeur setting in?

  'Yes. I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Pasadena. For a thesis on the semantic implications of the consonant-group "shm" in colloquial American speech.'

  'Semantics,' said Dr Railton. 'You didn't do very well with that "spiral", did you?'

  'I wasn't intended to do very well,' said Edwin.

  'Now,' said Dr Railton, sitting on the bed and speaking softly, 'I'm going to tell you a little story. Then I want you to re-tell the story in your own words. Right?'

  'Right.'

  'Once upon a time,' said Dr Railton, 'in the city of Nottingham, a policeman came to the door of the house of a gentleman called Mr Hardcastle, on Rook Street. Everybody along the street said: "Ah, they've come to arrest him at last, I knew he'd get found out sooner or later." But actually the policeman had only come to sell Mr Hardcastle a ticket for the annual police ball. Mr Hardcastle went to the police ball, got rather drunk, drove his car into a lamp-post and was, in fact, arrested, so that the neighbours were, in a prophetic sort of way, right. Now tell that in your own words.'

  'Why?' asked Edwin. 'What are you getting at? What are you trying to prove?'

  'I know what I'm doing,' said Dr Railton. 'Tell that in your own words.'

  'Nottingham has a castle, so that gives the gentleman his name,' said Edwin. 'A castle is a rook, so that explains the name of the street.'

  'Now the story,' said Dr Railton, 'please.'

  'I've forgotten the story. It's a silly story anyway.'

  Dr Railton made rapid notes. 'All right,' he said. 'What's the difference between "gay" and "melancholy"?'

  'There are various kinds of difference,' said Edwin. 'One is monosyllabic, the other tetrasyllabic. One is of French, the other of Greek, derivation. Both can be used as qualifiers, but one can also be used as a noun.'

  'You've got this obsession, haven't you?' said Dr Railton. 'With words, I mean.'

  'It's not an obsession, it's a preoccupation. It's my job.'

  'Let's try numbers,' said Dr Railton, sadly, patiently. 'Take 7 away from 100, then keep on taking 7 away from the remainder.'

  '93,' said Edwin confidently, then, less confidently, '86 . . . 79 . . . 72 . . .' A voice came from a darkened bed, saying:

  'It's all right if you play darts, ennit? That's all takin' away, ennit?' And he machine-gunned: '65, 58, 51, 44, 37, 30, 23, 16, 9, 2. Easy, ennit, if you play darts?'

  'Thank you, Mr Dickie,' said sarcastic Dr Railton. 'That will do very nicely.'

  'Have to, wunnit? That's the end of the numbers, ennit?' Then the sleeping sneerer next to Edwin began to intone fresh results:

  'Blackburn 10, Manchester United 5.

  Nottingham Forest 27, Chelsea 2.

  Fulham 19, West Ham 3.'

  'I suppose,' said Dr Railton, sighing, 'we've really done enough for one day.'

  'Pools on his mind, ennit?' said R. Dickie. 'Got them on his mind, that's what it is. Pools.'

  'Do you want a sleeping tablet?' asked Dr Railton. 'To make you sleep,' he explained. Edwin shook his head. 'Very well, then. Good night, Doctor Spindrift.' And he went out.

  'Proper sarky, enny?' said R. Dickie. 'Proper takin' the mickey. As if you'd be here if you was really a doctor.'

  Edwin put out his bedlamp, the last. The ward was now dark except for a dim pilot-light overhead and a lamp as dim on the night-sister's desk, a desk hidden cosily in an improvised hut of bed-screens. The night-sister was having supper somewhere.

  'Tellin' stories about Nottingham,' said R. Dickie. 'I bet he was never in Nottingham in his life. I had a sister got married there. Used to go and see her sometimes, I did. Nice little place, Nottingham. Marvellous the way they talk about what they don't know nuffin about, ennit?'

  CHAPTER THREE

  Edwin sat on the edge of his bed, his heart thudding, dragging on his cigarette hard, wondering why she hadn't come. Sunday morning had pealed and tolled itself away, rustling with the News of the World, a day without doctors or inflicted pain yawning ahead to be broken by two periods for visitors, an extra helping, a Sunday treat. But not, it would seem, for Edwin. Two struck in the tower across the square, half of the visiting time already gone, and she did not appear. R. Dickie was saying: 'That's right, yes, that's right, true enough,' to a voluble woman about eighty years old, probably his mother; the sneerer had a crafty-looking small clergyman with him, the one whining, the
other sneering, about the love of Jesus; farther down the ward a young man, chinned and humped like Punch, sat up in bed wearing a kind of ski-cap, discussing car engines with a lip-chewing nodding male relative. The two slices of Sunday roast beef had put new life into the patients. Agitated, Edwin found that his bowels wanted to move. It would serve her right, he snivelled, if she came and found him not there, perhaps thinking him wheeled away dead, it would serve her right.

  He sat in the lavatory, trying to remember which hotel she had now moved to, some place near this hospital. He could ring her up, perhaps, in this pub she seemed now to frequent, this pub where she picked up window-cleaners. But it was after two now, and two was closing-time. Then, as his bowels eased, a bolder thought struck him. He would dress, leave the hospital, look for her. The Anchor, that was the name of the pub, somewhere round there. A restaurant, probably.

  It was easy enough. The lockers were opposite the wash-places. To the music of the lavatory's flush he opened his own and, trembling, took out his crumpled trousers, his sports jacket, his tie and a shirt. It was no good, of course, seeking permission. But nobody would know. He entered one of the two bathrooms and began to dress. In the mirror he saw a face sane enough looking, young enough, healthy enough, a mass of brown hair only a little grey. He put on further health and sanity with his clothes, combed his hair sleek, lit a cigarette. But he still felt insufficiently armed. Money, of course, the lack of money. He had given the whole of his two months' salary, paid in advance in Moulmein, converted now to five-pound notes, to his wife. His wallet was thin and his pockets, save for a few shillings, empty.

  Nobody commented, nobody seemed to notice as he passed the glass case of the ward office. The nurses in there were giggling about something which belonged to their world without uniform, world of frocks and dances. Out of the tail of the eye they saw, perhaps, the clothes of a visitor. Edwin shut the heavy outer ward doors behind him and began to run downstairs. In the corridor that led to the vestibule were busts of bearded medical giants, set high in niches, a plaque of commemoration he had no inclination to read. Nor time, for, behind him, he heard a singing negro voice, that of the grave giver of ice-cream.

  Bells for the departure of visitors rang. It was incredibly easy. He passed the porter's desk jauntily, swinging his left arm. Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial. Edwin shivered, walked across the square and down an alleyway - flats on one side, a cut-price chiromancer on the other. He crossed a street of Sunday autumn strollers, turned a corner and came straight to the heartening facade of a tube station. Tubes meant both normality and escape. He looked down at his feet and saw that he was still wearing bedroom slippers. He wondered whether to whimper to himself, but then saw, across the street on a corner, the pub called the Anchor. He crossed, uncertain. Next to the pub was a narrow alley which a truck tried vainly to enter. The truck roared, thrust and backed, chipping two walls, clanging a mudguard on a street-post. Edwin skirted the truck, found beyond the alley a mean restaurant. From it came that percussion of knives and forks he had heard beyond the bed-screens last night, but this was robuster. The eaters could be seen through the two smeared shop-windows. One of them was Charlie, eating spaghetti unhandily, rolling sauced bales on to his fork and patiently watching them collapse back to his plate. By him was a wall-eyed man in a beret, lunching off beans. Charlie, his mouth open for a new attempt, turned towards the window and saw Edwin. He kept his mouth open but now ignored the load on his fork. 'In,' he mouthed through the window, jerking head and free thumb inwards. Edwin, with gestures of regret, pointed downwards at his bedroom slippers. 'Hardly right. People might think eccentric.' Charlie pressed his brow to the window, mouth still open, trying to look down. He saw no dog. He hesitated between eating the forkful and coming out to Edwin. His jaws pounced. Nodding triumph to the wall-eyed man and to Edwin, he chewed and swallowed; stray spaghetti-ends were drawn in, as if fascinated. Chewing, he came out to Edwin.

  'You shouldn't be here. You should be back there. Who said you could come out?' he bullied. 'You're ill.'

  'It's my wife. Sheila. She didn't come.'

  'You have it out with her,' said Charlie. 'I wash my hands of the whole business. If you collapse now on the street I'm not taking any responsibility.'

  'Where is she?' asked Edwin.

  'Where is she? How should I know where she is? I'm in there having a bite to eat with my mate. Spaghetti, as you can see. I'm not responsible. Now you get back to that hospital in double-quick time.'

  'I must see her first.' His feet were cold in their bedroom slippers. He had a perverse longing for the sick warmth he had just left.

  'You might try just down there,' said Charlie, pointing to the end of the grey street. 'A lot of them go there at throwing-out time. A club, you might call it. They have no members, only customers. It won't be long before the law gets on to them. If you go there, don't stay too long. Look good, won't it, you a sick man picked up by the law for illegal boozing. And in carpet slippers."

  'I'll try there.'

  'All right, but watch out. Now I'm going back to this spaghetti. Very hard to eat. Italian stuff it is.' He returned to the restaurant with a cross look. Edwin walked down the street, passing dim Indian restaurants that, he knew, should smell of turmeric but seemed instead to smell of size. He came to a corner, a shop of no name, its single shop-window opaque with blue paint, its door, the same blue with khaki panels, ajar. The passage floor, he saw as he gingerly entered, was littered with bits of old racing editions, fag-packets, a doll's torso, a flabby ball, dirt. Two doors on the left wall were padlocked. Another led to buried noise and music. Uneasy Edwin went towards this and opened it. In a blast of heat the noise rose up the cellar stair-well, warming the cold damp cellar-smell which, to Edwin, was curiously flowery. Unsafe precipitous stairs led to the ultimate door. Should he knock? No, said the door, opening violently. A wet-mouthed corner-boy in a turquoise sweater with the name, in stitched yellow on the chest, of J UD, was ejected with noise and protest. Edwin pressed to the wall.

  'Try vat once more,' said a youngish Semite in an old suit, 'and you won't just be frown aht. You'll ave certain fings done to you first. Fings vat will ensure you won't try vat sort of fing no more. Not only 'ere,' he promised, 'but everywhere.' He was growing untidily bald; his chocolate-brown double-breasted, sagging at the bosom, bagged at the knees. He began to push the corner-boy by the rump up the stairs. The boy snarled street words. The Semite, sad-eyed, raised chin and arm for a back-hander.

  'Bleedin' plice,' said the boy. 'Lot of old bags.' No whit daunted, he whistled his way up, each step resounding like a thumped herring-box. The Semite said to Edwin:

  'Vat's what you get. I've ruined vis place lettin' yobbos like vat one in. It's me who's ruined vis place and nobody else.' Sadly, and with a remnant of ancestral Levantine courtliness, he ushered Edwin in. A vast man in striped sweatshirt and snake-clasp belt stood facing them, beer in hand, very still, like a turn of human statuary Edwin had come to see. 'I'd have done that,' he said, 'if you'd asked, but you never asked.' He had small not unhandsome moustached features set, as print in some expensive edition, in a face with wide margins. Edwin looked for her over the heads of, in the gaps between, far uglier men and dishevelled women: though one trim drunken middle-aged woman in a smart hat twirled sedately to the music, her partner a glass of Guinness. The Semite shook his head in sorrow, his brown eyes full of sadness. 'Ve fings we get in 'ere,' he said. 'I'ate vis place,' he said, with bitter Mosaic passion, 'I'ate it like I've never 'ated anyfing else.'

  Edwin got to the bar, pushing, excusing himself, and there was Sheila, smart in her green costume. She opened her shocked eyes wide as, into him, relief pumped rapidly. 'Darl
ing,' she cried, holding out wide a cigarette and a gin-glass. 'You've escaped,' she said. 'They've taken your shoes,' she said, missing nothing.

  'You didn't come,' said Edwin. 'I was worried.'

  'But it's tonight I come, surely.'

  'Sundays are different. You can come twice on Sunday. On Sunday there's an extra session.'

  'Oh,' she said, 'I'm so sorry. I should have known. It was stupid of me.' What Edwin could not understand was that the Semite was in two places at once, moaning in tie and suit at the plywood counter, serving cheerfully in shirt-sleeves behind it. Out of this Dr Railton could make a nice quiz question. 'How did you know I'd be here?' she asked. 'Yes,' she said, 'I see your trouble. They're twins, you see, Leo and Harry Stone. That's Leo, behind the counter. They run this place, if you can call it running. A Greek tailor's just asked me how much for the afternoon, that dark man there pinched my bottom, and there's a sort of Englishman who dances in the most peculiar way.'

  'Could you perhaps,' asked Edwin, 'buy me a small whisky or something?'

  'Not whisky,' said Sheila. 'You've been told to lay off drink for two years. A light ale.'

  Edwin was served with a golden water tasting of soap and onions. 'Not so good, is it?' said Leo Stone. His baldness, Edwin noticed, was more advanced than that of his twin. His accent had a patrician overlay, as if he had sometime been a superior salesman. From the juke-box in the far corner two light American voices, of the new generation of castrati, sang of teenage love amid recorded teenage screams. Clumsy dancing began. A tattered dog arose from sleep and barked. 'All right,' said Harry Stone. 'Vey won't touch you, I can promise you vat. If one of vem was to lay a bleedin' 'and on you I'd 'ave 'im.' The dog yawned, comforted. Behind the counter an electric kettle suddenly sang. 'Vere,' said Harry Stone, 'your dinner's nearly ready. Just give it time to cool dahn. A lovely bullock's 'art,' he said to the vast moustached man. 'Could bleedin' near eat it myself.' The vast man belched on a draught of beer and converted the belch into Siegfried's horn call. He followed this with a cry of 'Nothung! Nothung!' and ended with a bar or two of the burning down of Valhalla. 'Take no notice,' said Harry Stone to Edwin. 'Works at Covent Garden, 'e does.' And he shook his head, his eyes frantic with pain, at the world's folly, looking at Edwin as though they two were in a conspiracy of sanity. The bullock's heart was pincered out of the kettle with two crown-cork bottle-openers; it steamed on the wet counter. 'You wait, Nigger,' said Harry Stone. 'Or, 'ere, Leo, just 'old it under ve tap.'