The Doctor Is Sick

  'Wonders of philology,' said Edwin proudly. 'Take this here dog, for instance.' He held up struggling Nigger, wearing a fish-head like a false nose. 'This is really a Spade, you see. Give a dog a bad name. Call a spade a spade. All done by kindness.' He put docile Nigger down with a flat metal clank. 'Wooden haft had a bark when it was on a tree. Dogs' affinity for trees. All ties up.' He looked up at the sky-ceiling to see Les walking on the grid. 'World tree withers,' sang Les. 'Gods gormless ghastly. Skylight in the gods, see? For flying Dutchmen.'

  'We turn now,' said Edwin, 'from matters of homophones to the whole question of love, love being the hardest collocation of phonemes ever bored by questing squirrel.' Coral appeared, skirtless. 'Bleedin' good pair we make,' said sad Harry Stone, trouserless. 'Phoney homo,' sneered Coral corally. 'Love, eh? Hardest whatever-it-was-he-said, eh? Hard, that's a good un.' 'My wife Sheila will now demonstrate love,' said Edwin, 'complete with seven sacred trances. Do not attempt to brighten your tellies, as much of this must be performed in darkness, being act of darkness. Begin. Commence. There, you see, are words of same meaning but different origin, Anglo-Saxon and French respectively, showing incomparable richness of English. While the demonstration is proceeding, this possibly being somewhat boring for prolonged viewing, I will endeavour to entertain you with priceless philological curiosities. These are normally sold only in public lavatories under VD sign. Special Chasperian dispensation brings them to you, great viewing public, tonight.' Energetic noises of love rose in crescendo. 'Crescendo, Italian loan-word, cognate with crescent as in moon and Mornington. Those noises in the background made by my wife and various persons unknown are, I think hardly susceptible to linguistic analysis. One has to draw the line somewhere.

  'Another point,' said Edwin, 'that must be made before my time runs out. Time by courtesy of Kettle Mob, incidentally. It is hardly fair that I should be fastened to a bed, absolutely immobile like Odysseus and other Greeks, wine-dark, lashed to the mast to hear unharmable compulsive music of the Sirens. It is all right, I hear some of you shouting, keep your hair on, mister. Not mister, please. Doctor, if you don't mind. Here is my diploma.' He held out feebly a piece of lipsticked toilet-paper: TWISTER. 'As for keeping my hair on, I should honestly like nothing better.' He smiled up at the camera on the ceiling. He raised a palsied hand to his head. To his profound astonishment hair was already sprouting, the wiry wool of a negro. In top hat and immaculate tails, twirling a silver-topped stick, Leo Stone danced on stage. He had enlarged his Semitic nose with cunning flesh-coloured wax. 'All together now,' he cried:

  ' 'E's got it on, 'e's got it on,

  'E's got it on agyne.

  Air in is bed and air on is 'ead

  And air in 'is bleedin' bryne.

  Oh . . . '

  'A phoney pair of homophones,' said Edwin indignantly. 'Air and air.' Aristotle Thanatos was leaning over him, his head a skull with an eagle's conk. He spoke modern Greek with a slight Turkish accent. His naked skull, by courtesy of the X-ray Department, slowly clothed itself in flesh. 'Carry on,' said Edwin. 'A little more.' But the flesh stopped at a stage of reasonable plumpness only. Edwin blinked at this. All images receded except that of a dressing-gowned man who was not Aristotle Thanatos, burbling his wet Greek over Edwin's bed however, like one whose neural ailment had affected the speech-centres. Edwin blinked a solid white ward into existence, but not the ward he had escaped from. He knew nobody there. Where was R. Dickie, where the sneerer, where the Punch-humped young man? Perhaps this was a different hospital. When one came to think of it, they would hardly be likely to take him back in that first one, not after behaviour they must have considered unpardonable. The Greek-speaker leaning over Edwin seemed mad and happy. He tottered off to the next bed, sociable though monoglot. Men lay in bed all the way along the ward, on both sides, some with dark glasses, most with bandaged heads, one with the dithering limbs of Parkinson's Disease. Edwin tenderly felt his own head. Something had grown there: immovable coils of crepe over a cotton-wool bed. He must have hurt himself hard when he passed out. And then Dr Railton walked in, cheerful, wiping lips that had trumpeted.

  'How,' said Edwin fearfully, 'did you get here?'

  'I work here,' said Dr Railton. 'How do you feel now, Doctor?'

  'I know,' said rueful Edwin. 'You were quite right, really. I'm too irresponsible for that high title. But I can't disown it, can I? I can't disown what was conferred upon me, can I?'

  'Don't get so excited,' said Dr Railton. 'And stop feeling guilty. Guilt is a big retarder of recovery.'

  'So you look at guilt clinically and not morally?' said Edwin. 'But if you had to give a moral judgment on me what would you say?'

  'That doesn't enter into it,' said Dr Railton. 'That doesn't come into the convenant between us. You rest now. Stop thinking.'

  'I'm sorry, anyway,' said Edwin.

  'If feeling sorry makes you also feel better,' said Dr Railton, 'you go on feeling sorry.' He rose from the bed's edge. 'I'll be in to see you later.'

  'Did you enjoy playing the trumpet last night?'

  'I always enjoy playing the trumpet,' said Dr Railton. 'The trumpet to me is possibly like the study of words to you. But,' said Dr Railton, 'I have a profession as well.' He smiled quite amiably and then left the ward.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A nurse came in to take his temperature and his pulse. She was a stout Irish body, potato-fed, plum-and-apple-cheeked. When the thermometer had been poked into its warm one-minute nest, Edwin tried a sly question or two, 'Where am I?' he asked. She was of peasant stock that would brook no Saxon nonsense. She said:

  'Don't be asking stupid questions. You're in the postoperative ward.'

  'You mean they've operated on me? Already?'

  'Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies. And I'm taking your pulse, as you can see.'

  'What day is it?' asked Edwin. She recorded his pulse-rate in a book, extracted and read the thermometer. 'All days are the same to them who work hard,' she said. She entered a blob on his temperature chart. 'Except Sunday, and even then the work has to go on,' she said, daughter of a poor farmer.

  'Was there anything unusual on the television last night?' asked Edwin.

  'How should I be knowing? A lot of nonsense, to be sure. I've better things to do than to be watching a lot of nonsense on the television.'

  'I'm sure you have,' said gallant Edwin. 'A pretty colleen like yourself.'

  'Don't be bold,' she said, and moved on to the next patient. But, standing there at her work, she cast a bold enough look back on Edwin.

  Before dinner a Church of England clergyman came visiting. 'I wonder if you'd mind answering a simple question,' said Edwin. 'What day is it?'

  'Day? Day?' He was a silvery vague old man. 'Well now.' He fumbled in an inner pocket and drew forth a diary whose entries seemed, to Edwin, remarkably few. 'I don't suppose this would help much. One really wants to know the date, I suppose. From the date one could work out, with the help of this little book, precisely what day of the week it is. I suppose,' he said, 'it's Wednesday or Thursday. 'I'm not sure. But 'I'm quite sure,' he smiled, 'that today is a week-day.'

  'Thank you,' said Edwin. 'And what time is it?'

  'Well,' said the clergyman, 'I'm afraid 'I'm always leaving my watch at home. But, ah, I see your watch, as I take it to be, is here on the bedside table. And that makes it, ah, nearly six.'

  'My watch?' said incredulous Edwin. 'How on earth did that get there?' The clergyman held it close to Edwin's eyes. It ticked away as a naughty cat, on its return from long absence from home, will purr away unperturbed by persons' past perturbations. It was his watch all right.

  'Get there?' echoed the clergyman. 'Well, it might be unwise, even blasphemous, to postulate thaumaturgy as an explanation. It would seem more reasonable to suppose that you yourself put it there. Or somebody, not divine, put it there for you.'

  'What,' asked Edwin, 'is Spindrift?'

  'Spindrift? Dear me, all these questio
ns. Spray, I should have supposed, drifting in from the sea. There's a poem by Kipling, I believe, that uses the word rather finely. "Something something something shall fail not from the face of it, something something spindrift and the fulmar flying free". A poem,' explained the clergyman, 'as you may have divined, about the sea.' He chuckled oldly.

  'Is it also a detergent or a washing-machine or anything like that?'

  'I have my washing sent to the laundry,' said the clergyman, rather distantly. 'Why, may I ask, do you ask?'

  'Oh, it's nothing,' said Edwin, 'really.'

  'Well, I'm glad we've had this little chat,' said the clergyman. Edwin looked sharply at him, to see whether he was sitting on a water-closet. 'Unless, of course, you have any other question to put to me,' he said humorously. 'Forgive me,' he added, 'I don't, of course, mean that if you have such a question I shall cease to be glad. These formulae one uses - quite meaningless. Words are treacherous things.'

  'Do you think,' asked Edwin slowly, 'a man is ever justified in leaving his wife?'

  'No,' answered the clergyman promptly. 'We are told that we are to forgive unto seventy times seven.' That disposed of that. He got up with arthritic difficulty from the bedside chair. 'If you'd like prayers, you know,' he said, embarrassed, 'or anything of that sort, I should be glad to, that is to say, I should be very happy to----'

  'You're very kind,' said Edwin.

  'I do believe you've been playing a little joke on me,' said the clergyman, with Christian forbearance. 'I see now from your temperature chart that Spindrift is, actually, your own name. Ah, I see. A sort of riddle, really. Well, good-bye. Sprindrift, spindrift,' he muttered genially to himself as he moved on.

  Edwin could eat little dinner (shepherd's pie with extra potatoes - mashed, saute, one baked). He was thinking of what he could say to Sheila if, of course, she came. He could forgive her, naturally, but forgiveness would be to her quite outside the terms of reference, presumptuous as well, for she would believe there was nothing to forgive. Perhaps it was really up to him to ask her for forgiveness, for wives did not usually go around committing fornication and adultery if they were happy at home. All this went back a long way and, he supposed, everything was ultimately his responsibility. What he proposed to do now was already fraught with its potential hangover of guilt. But that should be cancelled out by the guilt she ought to feel and never had felt when committing the sin of hurting him (for she had hurt him, horribly, and it was no good her saying that he had no right to feel hurt). He proposed to leave her because, in failing him when he'd needed her most, she'd given the lie to her own vaunted creed: being together was the important thing, the other thing didn't in the least matter. Leaving her, of course, would merely mean telling her to get out of his life. They were homeless in England, their few chattels were in Moulmein. Edwin was quite convinced that he would not be going back to Moulmein, quite convinced after everything that had happened. The future would have to be replanned when Sheila had been removed from the future.

  But, he wondered, had those fantastic things really happened? They must have happened, they still possessed in memory strong reality-tone. The clang of the CAGE chord in that club; Railton's polished trumpet catching the light from the stage-spot; an unsqueezed comedo on the upper lip of Harry Stone. And, above everything, that ghastly snorting busy nakedness, the train coming into the station, Sheila's high demented dying voice. That had most certainly happened. And, if that had happened, everything else had happened. But how could anything be proved or disproved? People had such a weak hold on reality, remembering only what they wished to remember. And even with the more cultivated - Railton, Chasper, Aristotle Thanatos - there would be a deliberate withholding, a desire not to add the humiliation of the record to the humiliation of the fact.

  Aristotle Thanatos. Edwin began to sweat and pant fearfully. Had he ever really known a man with that name? He racked and sifted his memory for Aristotle Thanatos. It was the sort of name a man might make up, like Mr Eugenides the Symrna merchant. Would any Greek be called Thanatos? He tried to relive fragments of his university life, to recall particular scenes, encounters. He seemed to achieve, at the expense of a splitting head, a picture of himself with three or four other men in the pub across the road from the Men's Union - the College Arms - discussing something gravely. Aesthetics, perhaps, or the Fall of France, imminent call-up into the forces or the precise definition of a technical term, the nature of baroque or something. He seemed to see, on the very edge of the group, a plump swart man, maturer than his companions. Edwin looked more closely and found that to be an Egyptian student of technology called Hamid. Aristotle Thanatos. Somebody met in his American post-graduate year? Such a name might well be found in America. He saw the speaker of modern Greek shambling about the ward in dressing-gown and slippers, dribbling, pretending to be a doctor, clumsily nodding over temperature charts. Edwin called him over by shouting: 'Eh!' The man came quickly, blundering into wheelchairs, catching his thigh on bedrails.

  'Name,' said Edwin. 'Your name.' He called up gobbets of Greek from the past. 'Kyrie. Onoma.'

  'Johnny,' dribbled the man promptly. 'Johnny Dikiko-ropoulos. Cyprus. Turk man no bloody good.'

  'Dunatos,' said Edwin. 'Is it possible onoma Thanatos?' The Cypriot immediately began to cry.

  'Damn it,' said Edwin angrily. 'I'm not saying anything about death or you dying. Is the name Thanatos possible? Are there any Greeks of your acquaintance with that name? Mr Thanatos. Mr Thanatos. Come back, blast you.' But the Cypriot went off blubbering. There were cries of Shame, insulting the poor bugger like that, just because he's a poor bloody foreigner, oughtn't to be allowed.

  'You,' said the ward sister, 'are going to have a sedative. We can't have the whole ward disturbed by one patient. You're too lively, you are.'

  'But,' said Edwin, 'I've got a visitor coming. My wife.'

  'No visitors for you. You're not ready for visitors yet, carrying on like that. You're going to have the screens round you.' She was a thin fierce woman with very old-fashioned spectacle-frames.

  'But I must see my wife,' said Edwin.

  'You'll see your wife all in good time. But not tonight.' She wheeled across the squeaking bed-screens, shutting Edwin from the lively sick world, 'Time enough to see your wife when you're better.'

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  'Well,' said Sheila, 'now you seem to be all right. Everybody was worried about you, you know.' She sat, darkly pretty, in a black wide skirt with a lime-coloured sweater, her fur coat sitting on her shoulders. It was the following evening. He felt rested, felt that he seemed to be all right. And various healing forces had conspired to a mood of forgiveness. He forgave himself. He forgave the past few days and all of the past beyond that. He forgave Sheila, but that was a secret, a note passed from himself to himself.

  'Why was everybody worried?' asked Edwin, taking Sheila's hand. It was a cold hand, but the autumn night was cold. It tapped at the window, crying its cold.

  'Yes, I don't suppose you'd know much about it, would you?' said Sheila. 'I shouldn't think there's much point in telling you about it, really.'

  'After I fell down, you mean?'

  'Oh, you remember falling, do you? They decided to postpone the operation. And then, so they say, you had some sort of post-operational shock. You were in a coma, apparently. I tried to get in several times to see you, but they wouldn't let me.'

  'And how is Nigel?'

  'Nigel? That idiot? He was a phoney, if ever there was one. But why do you ask? Why don't you ask how I am?'

  'I assumed you were all right. You look all right. You never looked better.'

  'I never felt so cold.' She shivered a little and pulled her fur coat more warmly round her shoulders, disengaging her lightly held hand to do so. She did not give her hand back to Edwin's hand.

  'And how,' asked Edwin shyly, 'is the other man? Nigel's successor?'

  'You seem very interested in my boy friends,' said Sheila. 'As for how Nigel's suc
cessor is, I'm afraid I don't know. Or rather I do know. Nigel's successor is suffering from a severe attack of non-existence.'

  'Oh, come off it,' said Edwin, suddenly weary, lolling his bound head on the pillow. 'This is unlike you. I know all about Nigel's successor, don't I? Although I want to forget all about him as quickly as possible.'

  'Why did you ask about him then? Look, Edwin, I don't have to say this, as you know, but if you think I've been spending this time in London on bouts of promiscuous love-making, you're very much mistaken. I went about with Nigel for a day or two because I thought he was amusing. Then I found he wasn't amusing. He also seemed to have a strong aversion to chlorophyll. He stank. In both senses.'

  'Did you get my laundry back from him?'

  'No, I didn't, but that doesn't matter.' Edwin looked hard at her. No successor to Nigel, eh? She had never lied before. Edwin said:

  'I'm a bit confused in my mind. I don't like to say you're lying, but I think you are. The trouble is that, at the moment, I'm the last person in the world to say that this happened and that happened. I don't know. But I have a powerful impression that certain things happened to me that, quite possibly, may not have happened at all.'

  'Oh,' said Sheila, 'anaesthetics, coma. You've been quite ill.' She gave him a hard look back. 'You're the last person in the world, as you quite rightly say, to start talking about anyone lying. I know you don't really mean what you're saying now. Lying's a nasty word.'

  'What I meant,' said Edwin, 'was that I didn't want you of all people to join the select group who are keeping silent about what I did, or think I did, during those three days, if it was three days. I know I was ill, but I still want to straighten out fact from fantasy, if there was any fantasy. 'If,' he added, 'there was any fact.' She looked puzzled. 'A question of ontology,' said Edwin. 'We can't go through the world in a state of confusion about reality.'