There were a dozen sailing boats in the harbor and a long jetty, though no one seemed to be going anywhere. On the front were a closed-up hotel and a couple of bars, outside the less dingy-looking one of which I took a seat and waited. Some helmetless teenagers on skinny bikes with two-stroke engines buzzed up and down the front, as though to keep at bay the afternoon ennui. A woman in slippers finally emerged from the interior and stood beside me. I asked for beer, and, while she was gone, took out a book to read. It was a short novel by a man who wrote elegantly but without any talent for the form. It had been well received, and I worried he would waste his life under the illusion that this was his calling.
There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers. I had no doubt that at least half the best writers had never put pen to paper because they had achieved early success in other occupations. As a young man—still not committed to what the Victorians called “mad-doctoring,” still wondering whether I might switch to surgery or general practice—I was posted to a Lancashire asylum. Even to a veteran of the Italian campaign, of slit trenches and shell wounds, it was a forbidding place. It had been built in optimism in 1848, and the only thing that had changed in the hundred years since was that the spirit of hope had died. Where idealistic doctors and Victorian nurses in starched white had once set out to gather in the lunatics from the industrial slums and the hill villages for a cure, now the same rooms, painted over a few times, were a warehouse for those whose illness had defeated medicine.
In my first week, I was sent to work in the men’s chronic wing. For relative youngsters like me, this was the baptism of fire: if you could emerge from it with your enthusiasm intact you might then get a posting to a part of the hospital where there was a hope of someone getting better. The consultant who showed me round was a man called Paul Gardiner. He told me he had wanted to be an architect, but the training took too long, so he had drifted into medicine.
There was a good deal of locking doors, clanking keys, and so forth; at one point we had to stand in a sort of no-man’s-land and wait to be let through by the turnkey on the other side. Then, at the end of a corridor, Gardiner unlocked the door to the “day room.” I was surprised that some of the patients had no clothes on. A few were walking up and down, talking, though not to one another. Many sat motionless in the chairs round the edge of the room; there was no conversation between them and no books, radio, or means of entertainment. Two charge nurses in short white coats moved among them.
“Bedlam, isn’t it?” said Gardiner without emotion. “Look at the size of that man’s genitals. Like a horse. Imagine the hydraulics. Lots of them are outsized in that way. Someone should write a paper on it. Connections and so forth. Inheritance.”
“How do you treat them?”
“Insulin comas. Sometimes we recommend lobotomy, and the county surgeon drops in on his rounds. It’s going out of fashion, though. We give electroconvulsive therapy. You know what that is?”
“Yes. The spasm may be beneficial.”
“And pigs might fly. It’s really a question of management. We try to see that they don’t harm themselves or others. We have to submit our figures to the authorities every quarter.”
One night, after I had been there a few months, I was the duty doctor. This entailed being on call in case of emergency, and I found it a good time to catch up with paperwork. The duty office was a glass-fronted cubicle off the main corridor; the strip-lit interior had metal filing cabinets with patients’ confidential records and a staff roster pinned to a notice board. By the low wattage of the desk lamp, I filled in patients’ notes. These had to be something that would make sense to another colleague picking up the file, but after a few weeks I had taken to writing an additional clinical diary for my own benefit; this was more personal opinion and would hardly have made sense to anyone else, but it helped me to try to see shape or pattern in the lives of these people. So it might say: “Some of his stories remind me of Kafka. His main voice is like that of a narrator in Conrad. Where does he get this from? Because he shows no sign of having read much…”
On the night in question I had brought the paperwork up to date and was thinking about a nurse I had seen earlier in the day. She was crossing the car park on her way to Cedar House, which housed young female patients. This girl with her black nylon calves and slightly mussed auburn hair had some promise, I was thinking, when Bob, the charge nurse, knocked at the door.
“It’s Reggie, doctor. He’s gone off on one. We’ve had to put him in the cell. But I think he’ll need a jab.”
We moved smartly down the corridor to the cell that was kept ready at all times beyond yet another locked door. Reggie had been in the hospital for about twenty years and was now in his late forties. He was shouting in distress and wrenching at his jacket. This happened when his delusions overwhelmed him; he thought his clothes carried some poison, like the shirt that killed Hercules.
I listened to his ranting for a bit, while Bob and I held his hands to stop him tearing at himself. He told me he could see animals on the walls of the cell. I wondered what would happen if instead of reaching for the syringe in my pocket, so we could all have a quiet night, I tried to engage with the content of his madness.
Then I met Reggie’s wide eyes with mine (Bob and I were still gripping his wrists) and said, “Who’s Paddy and where did you meet him? When were you in Bolton?” and so on.
Engaging like this was not established practice—it was, in fact, unheard of—but it seemed worth trying when all else had failed. After half an hour or so, I told Bob he could leave because Reggie had calmed down enough that I thought he was no longer a danger to himself or to me.
I didn’t get far with the facts or the stories. I managed to get Reggie to start off on who this Paddy was, but it seemed to breed another dozen tangents and dead ends. What was frustrating was the sense that I was reading random paragraphs from a very long book, out of order. The whole book might be as rational as a Henry James novel; there might be a world in which it all made sense. It certainly did to him. That was what so distressed him: to Reggie there was nothing random; it was the coherence that made it unbearable.
For several hours, I traveled with him in that garish landscape; I felt that I needed to draw on my own potential for psychosis without forfeiting my sanity. His breath had the smell of medication and fear, and a vinegary character I’d noticed on other patients with his condition. His large body had a whiff of the tramp. He didn’t call me by my name or address me; he talked not to me but through me, as though to someone more real to him.
Eventually, his storm seemed to pass. Maybe simple fatigue caused a chemical alteration in the brain that was enough to switch off a circuit … But it was tempting to think that what had calmed him down was knowing that he was not alone—in other words, that my concern had helped.
It was one o’clock in the morning when we left the cell, and the unused syringe was still in my pocket. I took Reggie up to his bed in the ward, offered him a sleeping pill, and watched while he climbed in. It was hard to resist the thought that I had helped him. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t so, but the vanity kept whispering in my ear.
* * *
FOR DINNER BACK at Pereira’s house I put on a linen suit, the kind of thing I thought he would appreciate: the outfit of the playful diplomat. I had a white shirt and a purple tie that I’d long been looking for a chance to wear. I had always had a weakness for purple. As a child I had had a paint box and had offered my mother many bad pictures in tones of mauve. When on early summer Saturdays I earned pocket money weeding the beds at one of the bigger houses in the village, I found the colors of the roses filled me with a physical ache. Red, cream, orange, yellow … I wanted to have a favorite but shuddered at the idea of discarding any.
In the shop at the port, I’d bought a bottle of gin and some lemons, with which I made myself a drink in the glass from the bedside table. It would have been better with ice, but
it served a purpose, I thought, as I pushed open the window and then sat back against the pillows.
How many times had I done this? How many foreign rooms alone? How many bottles would I drain before the end? I believed that when I died one of the joys would be a statistical breakdown of my life. Volume of wine drunk. Wine bottles drunk by region: Rhone, 20,000; Bordeaux, 18,000 …
Perhaps for reasons of self-preservation, I had brought my old diary with me, not trusting it to the aircraft hold but carrying it in my briefcase. As I drained the glass, I opened it at the page that recounted my first days of trying to become a doctor, reading medicine at university. I put down the book and shut my eyes.
My university college opened off a backstreet. There was an unexpected gate in a long wall, and there I suddenly was. A lodge on my right seemed the best place to begin; a man in a bowler hat traced my name from a clipboard and handed me a key. I heaved my case over the cobbles and through an arch, wondering what on earth I was doing. I was a country boy who should have been riding a horse or clearing a ditch, but some facility with numbers at a village school had led me step by logical step to this cloister. I hadn’t chosen to come; I had merely failed to resist the ambitions of others.
The case held all my books, all my pretensions to learning. I went into a second quadrangle with blazing flower beds and wisteria, and onto a flagstone courtyard where I saw a staircase marked “T.” My lodging was on the top floor—of course—with windows on both sides. The study was at the front, but the bedroom overlooked a willow and a stream on which two young men were inexpertly rowing. Some lines from Tennyson—“By the margin, willow-veil’d…”—swam in and out of my mind.
I unpacked my few clothes and put them in a chest; my books filled only one end of the shelf. The desk sat foursquare with its view over the creeper-covered quadrangle, challenging me to work. The bedroom was a different matter. A plain headboard and a candlewick bedspread gave no hint of comfort; the springs creaked as I sat down; the furniture might have come from my grandparents’ boardinghouse. Yet if I took the cushion from the armchair in the study, I could prop myself up on the bed with the window open and hear the rustle of the willow leaves and, if I listened hard, a hint of running water.
I began to read. After a page or so there came a rude knocking on my door, and I went back through the study to open it.
“Hello. I’m Norman Grout—maths, second year. You’ve got a nice room.”
I shook hands with a scruffy man with dark curls and a stained pullover.
“I say, shall I come in?”
“If you like. Robert Hendricks. Medicine.”
“Shall we have some tea?”
“I don’t think I—”
“Yes you can. Look.”
He opened what I had thought was a cupboard door but turned out to be the entrance to a scullery with a sink and a gas ring. In a cupboard were some old cups with the college crest and a full tea caddy.
“You boil the kettle,” he said. “I’ll get some milk from downstairs.”
Soon Norman Grout was giving me the inside facts of college life.
“Just be careful not to say anything about the Scots. The foundation goes back to Robert the Bruce or William Wallace or some nationalist loon. They wanted a toehold in enemy country.”
“I thought their education was supposed to be so much better than ours.”
“I’m sure it is, but they like it both ways. There’s Burns Night, of course; Walter Scott Weekend; the Feast of Bannockburn. You might want to hire a kilt. Drummonds in Trinity Street can give you an inoffensive tartan. Just be careful what you say in the hall or in the pubs.”
I had no anti-Scottish feeling and no intention of visiting the pubs, I told him. I must have sounded priggish.
The dining hall reminded me of a scene from an epic motion picture, a Hollywood Tudor. I hid as far as possible from thrown chicken legs—among the sconces and the candles, the gowns and reading glasses of the timid undergraduates—glancing up only once or twice to the high table, where the kings feasted.
After dinner, Norman Grout said we were we going to a pub called the Black Lion, famous for its engraved glass and its association with future prime ministers. Apart from a bottle of cider on a Saturday morning and the occasional “fruit cup” at one of the high-school girls’ parties, I had drunk little alcohol. Two others joined us at the gate, and there were more from my college when we got there. Beer fell under gravity from inclined barrels into large pots that were thumped with a splash on the bar. No money changed hands, as the landlord apparently kept a mental note of what was poured. I wasn’t sure that I could hold that much fluid. I’d had a glass of water with dinner and felt no thirst.
“Drink up, Robert,” said a man with a beard. He looked thirty but was apparently a first-year medic, like me. I forced down the remainder of the beer and found another huge pot placed in my hand.
Some hours later I climbed the steps of T staircase to my room, feeling calm and powerful. I half stumbled as I switched on the light and looked proudly at my new lodgings. I felt I should prosper there. That soon I might be offered a prize fellowship and dine beneath the blazoned shields of high table. The next day there were lectures from nine and a visit to the dissecting room. So be it. I was a farm boy, unafraid of blood; I was clear of eye and steady of hand. I had found my destiny.
Then I noticed something odd: a woman’s handbag on the armchair. It had not been there before. It could hardly be Norman Grout’s. I knocked at my own bedroom door.
“Robert?” A girl’s voice came back.
“Yes.”
The door clicked and opened. It was Mary Miller.
“Mary.”
She laughed. “Surprise. I know. The porter lent me a key. I said I was your sister. My college won’t let new girls in till tomorrow, and I didn’t want to waste money on a hotel, so…”
Or something like that. It didn’t make much sense, but in my new serenity I was indulgent.
“That’s quite all right. Have you had dinner?”
“Yes, thanks. My godmother lives nearby, and she took me to a restaurant. We had a lot of wine. I say, Robert, this is the loveliest room. Is it because you won a prize?”
“I don’t know. It’s where they told me to come. Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, please. Show me where it is and I’ll make it. I love this view over the river. I could be so happy here.”
She laughed. When she’d made the tea, she carried the cups back into the bedroom. “It’s much nicer in here,” she said. “Let’s just have the lamp on. That’s it. Open the window a bit wider and we can hear the river.”
We sat propped up, side by side, on the bed, sipping the tea. More liquid was the last thing I needed, but it seemed the right thing to do.
“That’s a nightjar,” I said.
“What?”
“Listen. There. That churring noise that turns into someone smacking his lips.”
“Oh, yes. I can hear it now. Robert?”
“Yes?”
“Will it be all right if I stay the night? I’ve got a toothbrush in my bag.”
“Yes. I can sleep on the floor. I don’t mind.”
We sat for a time in silence, but it was an easy one.
“Robert?”
“Yes.”
“You know when we lived next door?”
“Of course. I remember the first time I saw you. I was sitting by my window reading Catullus, and you came out onto your parents’ lawn in your tennis clothes.”
“Why didn’t you call out and say hello?”
“I didn’t know you. Anyway, I quite liked just watching.”
“I know.”
“What?”
“I knew you were watching,” said Mary. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Several times after that, before we became friends.”
“You knew?”
“Yes. What did you like about watching?”
I reflected calmly. “I liked the
fact that you had a father.”
She laughed. “Anything else?”
“I liked the look of your house. I liked the way your hair fell forwards.”
“And?”
“I liked it when you scratched your thigh, when you were lying on your front.”
Mary put down her cup and arranged herself facedown. “Like this?”
It occurred to me that she had possibly drunk as much as I had.
I stood up, feeling imperious. “Yes. Like that. Now scratch yourself.”
She laughed and lifted her skirt. “There really were insects and things. Of course, I had bare legs then, with my tennis skirt. Shall I take my stockings off?”
“Yes. You can put them on that chair.”
She resumed her place on the bed. “I liked it that you were looking at me. It made me feel … bad.”
“Bad?”
“In a nice way.” She laughed. “And did you want to … touch me?”
“Yes. I wanted to scratch your leg for you. Shall I show you?”
“Yes.”
When I had shown her, she said, “What about Paula? Aren’t you in love with her?”
It seemed I could barely remember Paula. “No, Mary,” I said grandly. “Paula was a … passing infatuation.”
I ran my hand over the top of her thighs again, inside the loose underwear. It seemed no less than I deserved, I thought, as I lay back on the bed, proud as a young pasha in his new command.
Mary straddled me and looked down. Her eyes were wide and her lips were swollen. She was still smiling. Then I felt something I had not felt before: a surge of gratitude.
She undid the buttons of her blouse and threw it to one side. “I think this is the right thing to do, don’t you, Robert?”
She lowered her head and kissed me.
* * *
THE LECTURES WERE relentless, starting at eight thirty, but they weren’t difficult to follow. There was full cadaver dissection in a gloomy hut with a tin roof (the corpses were known as Fred or Martha). I liked slicing through beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down over your wrists, and picture the billion firing synapses that for many years had made the cauliflower believe that it was Fred.