In the Middle of the Wood (17 page)

As he turned round in his bed he saw that the psychologist was gazing at him intently, as if examining him.

And just at that moment also he saw that the hospital was crawling with ministers, like black beetles. They moved from bed to bed peering down at the patients. And then he realized that some of them were priests. One of the latter leaned over his bed and said, “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. The eyes which pretended to be kind were in fact cold. The ministers gathered like vultures round dead bodies. Stocky, applecheeked, they were in fact dangerous enemies: they had been sent for to pass judgement on him, to pronounce him insane.

Then he saw the lawyer striding briskly across to his bed.

“I have made out the will,” he said. “You'd better sign it. I'll get two witnesses.”

He signed and the lawyer passed the will to one of the ministers, a fat jovial fellow with a red face. The lawyer didn't show the minister the provisions of the will at all, but placed his hand over the document. The minister scrawled his name quickly. So did a youth who was sitting on a chair talking to a patient in the next bed. So that was it: the lawyer didn't really intend to execute the provisions of this will at all. It was all a pretence.

And where was Linda? Now as the final denouement had taken place she would never come again. He closed his eyes. The lawyer disappeared. The ministers and the priests moved like crows among the patients. Another of them leaned over him. He had a squint eye and his hand was fat and flabby. The slant yellow strokes on the cubicle wall dizzied and scarred his eyes. Even if Linda came he would not be able to keep his eyes open. The ministers swarmed about the ward, sucking sustenance from one white shrouded bed after another. They belonged among the dead. They were black bees among white roses. Linda hadn't come, he was finally alone.

In the ambulance the following day there was only himself and the psychologist. He rocked from side to side, and, as he did so, he looked out of the window at the beautiful autumn colours of the day. There were ordinary people walking along the streets with shopping bags in their hands, a boy cycling invulnerably along, a youth and a girl strolling hand in hand. The world that he would never enter again, that he must leave forever behind him. How dear it was, how little he had taken account of its freedom in the past. They left the town and raced along beside a moorland with lochs in it, the untroubled blue of water. How splendid and fine it all was, that heartbreaking picture of serenity. The psychologist smiled at him but didn't speak. Ralph drew his dressing-gown more closely about him as if he were cold. Now and again the ambulance driver waved to a passing van or bus, negligently, cordially.

They had been an hour on the road when they arrived at a large building, along whose side they drove. Eventually they were taken along to a room and told to wait there. Ralph looked up idly and saw that the lamp above the bed had been decorated with a Mexican hat: it was the only odd decoration in the room. This didn't surprise him, it was only another incident in the war of nerves that was being waged against him. Suddenly he saw Linda walking along a corridor and then coming in.

“I raced after you in the car,” she said. He was astonished to find her there at all. This appearance didn't seem part of the script he had worked out. According to the scenario he had modelled she should now be sitting with her fat lover drinking wine, being comfortable.

“What did you come here for?” he asked angrily.

“What do you mean what did I come here for? I had to see that you were all right.”

“Yes. Now that you have put me here.” He wanted to hurt her as badly as he could. He wanted to reduce his dependence on her but he couldn't. He was glad that she had come but he couldn't understand why. This of course was the reason for her visit: she wished to confirm that he had arrived in the Mental Home.

He looked up and saw a grey-haired woman patrolling the corridor. She was going round and round the quadrangle which formed the central core of the hospital. The woman was gaunt, silent, studious: he immediately christened her Lady Macbeth.

“Have you got everything you need?” said Linda anxiously.

“I don't know. I don't care.”

“I brought you some money. There might be a shop here.” She handed him over some money and he placed it in a locker.

“Do you see that? That hat?” he said aggressively.

She considered it and said, “It's odd right enough. The arm of the lamp looks broken.” She switched the lamp on and it emitted a pale light hardly to be seen in the daylight.

“At least it's working,” she said.

“Why must it always be something of mine that has something wrong with it?” he asked.

“I don't know. I don't understand. Perhaps it was a nurse's prank.”

“Huh.”

He was sure it wasn't a nurse's prank. There were too many wrong things, too many coincidences. But what was the inner meaning of leaving a Mexican hat? He was sure it must have some deep inner significance. An allegory, symbolism. But he couldn't work it out.

“You had better go,” he said firmly.

“Is that what you want me to do?”

“Yes. That's what I want you to do. You should never have come in the first place.”

She regarded him sadly. “I won't be able to come so often now. This place is further away.”

“Naturally,” he said.

“But I'll do my best.”

“I'm sure you will,” he said ironically. “How do you get sleep?”

“I don't know,” she whispered. Her voice was very low as if there was something wrong with her throat. He was sure that the reason for this was that she was wearing a bug and she wanted only his comments to be picked up.

“I don't want the nurses to hear us quarrelling,” she said.

“I don't care,” he said. “I know what you're at.”

“What do you think I'm at?”

“You have a bug,” he whispered. Linda rose to her feet angrily. She was almost weeping but he thought this was her good acting.

“You obviously don't want me here,” she said.

“You're right.”

But when she did go it was as if his whole life was draining away from him.

Shortly after she had gone a thin tall unsmiling man entered the ward and began to pace from his bed to the opposite wall and then back again. He did this with an obsessive pertinacity, remorselessly, as if he were an automaton. Ralph smiled defensively at him but he didn't smile back. Again he felt fear as if this dour robot might attack him. First there was the grey-haired Lady Macbeth and now this tense unsmiling man from whom emanated an air of suppressed violence.

After a while a man came in with a stethoscope hung over his neck like a snake.

“I'm Doctor Malone,” he said in an Irish accent. “If you will wait here for a moment I'll be back for you.” Of course he was another spy pretending to be a psychologist. He was handsome, debonair, careless. Suddenly it occurred to Ralph that this was Linda's lover, and not the taxi driver: the whole plot smelt of a psychologist's expertise. And this too was why Linda had come. The plan had been evolved from this very place: he had made a mistake: he hadn't fully realized the complexity of it.

He waited and waited while the thin tense man paced up and down, counting his steps, and when the doctor didn't come he decided that he would go to bed, even though he hadn't been told to. He sat up in bed and watched the relentless repetitive journey of his room mate who completely ignored him. The doctor had left his stethoscope on a neighbouring bed: there was silence everywhere, an oppressive silence. In the middle of it he could hear through the open window the humming of bees. Could he escape from here? Some people had. He couldn't sign himself out, that was certain. He wanted to write something but he couldn't for firstly he couldn't find pen and paper and secondly his concentration had gone.

After a while the doctor came back and said cheerfully, “Come along now if you please.”

They sat in chairs opposite each other. The psychologist told him a story as the doctor in the hospital had done and he answered the questions correctly. He was told to remember a certain address which this time was 56 Osborne Street.
He analysed it in his mind but couldn't find any connections hanging to it. The psychologist asked him about his novels but he didn't want to talk about them: he knew that Malone hadn't read any of them anyway. The whole place was very quiet: he could hear no violent noises, no mad ravings. The sun shone pleasantly through the windows.

“When will I be out of here?” he asked abruptly.

“Not long,” said the psychologist smiling. “Not too long at all.” What a Celtic liar you are, thought Ralph. You are like all the Celts, a gentle hypocrite.

“Two weeks?” he probed.

“I wouldn't know about that, not at all,” said the psychologist, still smiling. Ralph stared unsmilingly back. In fact he couldn't smile at all nowadays. If he tried to, he felt that his face would crack. He felt like an agent under interrogation: he didn't want to give anything away. Dr Malone took him back to his own room and Ralph pointed to the stethoscope lying on the bed.

“I would forget my own head,” said the psychologist.

The thin man was still pacing obsessively up and down. Ralph wanted to ask him about the Mexican hat but decided not to. Suddenly with a brutally quick movement the thin man left the room and Ralph was alone in the overwhelming silence. He waited as if he expected that at any moment a violent madman would burst in, and kill him. The buzzing of the bee was loud in his head which felt as if it would break into pieces. He saw Lady Macbeth on her endless peregrinations. Who would have thought that she had so much blood in her? He stared down at his pyjamas whose stripes matched the stripes of the bee, yellow and black. A breeze stirred the curtains. It occurred to him that they had left him alone like this so that he would attempt to escape but he wasn't going to give them that pleasure.

He stared through the window. Two men with shaven heads and faces as blank and square as loaves were bending down, putting leaves in a wheelbarrow. They gave him a feeling of terrifying desolation. He knew at once that they were patients from the bad wards: they looked inhuman, their movements jerky as in an ancient silent film.

He turned away from the window. The psychologist, whom he had travelled with in the ambulance, was just coming in. He smiled at him and walked over and sat on his bed in the corner. It was all beginning again.

Having a desire to pee he walked along the corridor in search of a bathroom. He found one and went in. There was a man standing there washing his face. Ralph stared into the mirror: his face had become small like a monkey's and his eyes fixed and dull. He thought, So this is what a madman looks like. In the waste of the glass he looked frightened and brutal and vulnerable, all at the same time. He walked slowly back to his room.

The psychologist was sitting on his bed.

“Do you see that ray?” he said.

“No.” said Ralph. “I don't see any ray. Where did you see it?”

“It's coming in through the window.”

“I don't see anything,” said Ralph.

“I have been here before,” said the psychologist. “I took aspirins.”

“Oh?”

“I was working too hard. I work on a farm.”

“Aspirins,” said Ralph. “I took sleeping tablets. They found me lying in the middle of a wood. I nearly died,” he concluded proudly.

“Aspirins I took,” said the psychologist. “I work on a farm,” he repeated. “Like hell you do,” said Ralph to himself. “Do you think I'm simple?”

“I was here for three weeks,” said the psychologist. “They're telling me they're sending me to Glasgow to have a look at my head.”

“What treatment is that?” said Ralph.

“I don't know.”

“I'd refuse that,” said Ralph. “I don't want them to tamper with my brain. If they do that to you, you become like an idiot.”

The psychologist didn't answer. It was as if he had used up all his words for the moment.

Ralph felt that he was crossing swords with this psychologist who was pretending to be a farm worker. Why, look at his brow, it was too high for a farm worker's. The psychologist placed all his possessions tidily in his locker. Everything he had was neat and new. His shaving gear was in a black leather case.

Ralph felt like a small boy going to school for the first time. Even now the memory was sharp in his mind. He was wearing short trousers and his knees were bony and pale. There were prefects in uniform all about him. There was a smell of carbolic from the floors and light pouring through the windows as here. The season too was autumn.

The psychologist stared at his ray and then he too went to the bathroom.

That night Ralph sat in the television room along with four or five others, some of whom were sitting silent staring straight ahead of them, some of whom were talking. In the middle of a programme about nurses he suddenly saw three Japanese entering, and speaking in their own language: their faces looked alien and threatening. He knew that this
wasn't part of the programme and was about to leave, feeling uneasy and disoriented when a nurse sat beside him and said, “I'm afraid you'll have to change your room tonight if that's all right. I should like to tell you about it. I'll be back later.” He turned his face away from the television set and waited for a long time but she didn't come. Later he walked along the corridor to his room. Finding no one there he sat down on his bed. He thought he might phone Linda but decided against it: he was no longer going to be a beggar asking for love. But he felt lonely and dispirited. The fact that the nurse hadn't come to the television room as she had promised bothered him. And he didn't like the idea of changing his room, which was much more comfortable and modern than he had expected. It was true that the patients didn't speak much but they did not look menacing and almost brutal, as the men collecting the autumn leaves had done.