The Doctor Is Sick (10 page)

There were, of course, cellars. My God, didn't he know there were cellars? He knew, too, where a stairway -grubby and unclinical – seemed to lead down to those cellars; it was a corridor or so back. Those stairs had become a mere appendix, an unwanted organ, for lifts were the order in descending to the torture-rooms. Edwin walked back to the shadows and found the stairway, found it creaked abominably. At its foot he found a closed canteen and kitchen doors. Of course. He had forgotten. There was more than one depth of cellar. He saw a window through which moonlight slanted; outside a squalor of garbage-cans; next to the window a door. Hopefully he tried it, but it was locked. Then he tried the
window. The lower catch slid open; could he reach the upper one? He looked round – a box, a chair, anything to stand on? Amazingly, there lurked a small set of steps in a corner, of the kind that could be folded into a clumsy kitchen chair. Doubt swirled into his brain. Was this all a trap? Had they foreknown, with their long experience of head-cases, that he would try to get out of it, try to escape? Did this always happen on the eve of an operation, under the influence of a particular kind of soporific? Was it considered helpful to the patient to let him get so far, easing his claustrophobia, before leading him gently and humorously back to bed? Would Dr Railton and others, perhaps Mr Begbie himself, be waiting outside now? He would soon know. He lifted the set of steps and carried it to the window. He climbed up and undid with ease the top catch. The window opened gently and a still autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil. It was too easy. He clambered out, dropped a few feet into an area. Two cats ran away without noise, but another clattered a dustbin-lid. There was a spiked railing and a gate to match. The gate was padlocked, but the climb over was not difficult – foot on the dust-bin, foot up, he leapt to the street. The rip in his trousers was a nuisance, but not grave. Sheila would sew that up for him.

He could not afford to loiter in the street. Some nurse or orderly who knew him might be coming on duty: he was vague as to what time the day staff started. The night porter might appear on the front steps in the guise of an amateur selenologist picking out the Sea of Storms and the Sea of Tranquillity. A policeman might be suspicious. Edwin walked at a tangent away from the rolling façade of
the hospital, skirting the railings of the square, finding a side street with shops and a genuine Tudor pub and ancient alleys branching out of it. He would be safe, he thought, round here, waiting for a safe time for decent people to be around. It was, he reckoned, now almost five.

Thank God he had taken the trouble to memorise the name of Sheila's hotel. The Farnworth. Fearful of losing the name, he had composed a rhymed mnemonic one night before sleep:

He could not in all decency go there till some reasonable hour, perhaps the hour of breakfast when, if the breakfast-room faced the street as in most small hotels, he might catch her attention as she crackled her toast. She did not eat much, but she was fond of breakfast. He did not fancy ringing the bell and confronting the management dressed as he was. But where exactly was the Farnworth? He could find out from a telephone directory. He might find a telephone directory in a telephone kiosk.

Wait! He could then, at a reasonable hour, ring up his wife and she could bring a taxi to collect him from an arranged spot. That would save a lot of embarrassment. But some tiny gnat-voice in his head told him that his wife was not altogether to be trusted. Why had he worried about having cash and something to pawn, when his wife had the sizeable balance of two months' salary? Why did he feel that his wife, humouring him over the telephone, would fetch not a taxi but an ambulance with strong men? But, he reflected, this distrust was natural: there were too
many people seeking only his own good. His wife was his wife; Sheila was Sheila. She would understand, she would agree, she would help.

He walked down the side street to a wide thoroughfare of shop-windows and offices. This, he assumed, was one of the main arteries of London, a city he did not know very well. There were sodium street-lights, lights in windows. Occasional cars sped by. There was even an airline bus crammed with yawning passengers. Edwin saw himself reflected in a window full of tape-recorders – baggy, lean, a superior face between woollen cap and pyjama-collar, a viable get-up for a place like London. Then he sought a telephone directory. It was something to do. If stopped by a policeman, he could tell the truth and say he was hurrying to a telephone kiosk. Something urgent, as the pyjamas showed, if not the tie. The woollen cap? Something, perhaps, connected with the urgency.

It was some time before he came to a kiosk with even any single volume of the London directory, much less the one he required. But at last, near a statue on horseback and a shop with American suitings, he found this work in many volumes, a thesis for some super-doctorate. On the way he had met no police – only a strayed reveller, a hangdog workman or so, many cats. He reflected that not only was he unfamiliar with London: he had not been in England for over three years. This feeling of strangeness exacerbated his nervousness, his sense of being a quarry. He groped in his inner pocket and felt reassured by the solid walls of his passport.

He had not thought it possible that there should be so many Farnworth Hotels. He chose one with the same postal district number as the hospital, but the name of the
street meant nothing to him. Still, that would be something more to do, finding the place. Now he had many hours to fill in. This glass coffin on end seemed a fairly safe place in which to rest for a while. There were, he thought, few suspicious activities which could, in comfort and secrecy, be carried on in a telephone box. He took out his money, counted it as for a long-distance call, and found he had, in British currency, something over three shillings. He had also a few odd rupees and other foreign coins as well as a nail-file and a tiny pocket-knife. He was fairly sure that, despite the rise in the cost of British living that had taken place during his exile, it must be possible to buy a cup of tea and a few cheap cigarettes somewhere. Not yet, of course; at least, not in this district of shops and offices and late risers and arrivers.

Idly he pressed Button B. To his great surprise and delight four pennies chinked out gaily. This he took to be a good omen. It did not seem fair, however, that he should pocket this gift and spend it later on something atelephonic. Once, at the end of the war, he had proffered a ten-shilling note in a Berkeley Street tobacconist's and been given change as for a pound. He immediately bought further cigarettes to the amount of ten shillings. That seemed only right. Now he proposed to give the Post Office back its fourpence. Inspiration hit him. He looked up the number of the hospital and then, coppers already inserted, wondered what accent to assume. He decided on a stage Irish one, then dialled the number.

‘Sure,' he said wetly, ‘and there's some important information I'm wanting to be giving ye.'

The tired voice at the switchboard said: ‘Yes? I'll put you through to the night porter.' There were windings
and yawns. Why, wondered Edwin, the night porter? Why not some doctor or sister or other? ‘Hallo?' said the night porter.

‘Sure, and have ye a patient that's escaped from your hospital?'

‘Escaped? Escaped? What do you mean, escaped?' It was the voice of one who didn't sleep enough during the day. ‘There's nobody
escaped
, as you put it.'

‘Oh, well now, there's a man here in Hounslow who says he's escaped, so if ye're wanting the spalpeen at all, ye'll know where to be finding him.'

‘Where did you say? What are you talking about?'

‘In Cockfosters, it is,' said Edwin. ‘Sure, and I'll be mistaking my own name next.'

‘It strikes me,' said the voice, ‘that you're barmy. People don't
escape
from here. This is not a loony-bin.'

‘All right, me boyo,' said Edwin. ‘Don't say ye haven't been warned. May the blessed Virgin Mary and all the holy angels and saints guard ye and keep ye,' he added. Then he rang off. Curious. Did the American sister believe him to be still straining away there? Did she perhaps, being new to the country, think it possible that the British tempo of evacuation was different from that of the States? Curious that the whole hospital should not be humming with panic. He himself now hummed a little tune, hands in pockets, encased in this tiny pharos. He took one hand out to press Button B, but this time there was no free gift of coin, no – he laughed – metallic evacuation or nomismatorrhea.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was still early, but there were purposeful people around rushing for tube-trains. Edwin had left his coffin because a woman, short, middle-aged, with a moulting fur coat, had come along to be a
bona fide
incumbent. (But could you say ‘incumbent'? That meant a lier-upon. Perhaps ‘instant' was more correct, and it conveyed also her urgent coin-tapping on the outer glass.) Edwin, evicted, wandered slowly along, thinking that, if William Barnes or the Nazis had had their way with the English language, there might now be
FARSPEAKER
instead of
TELEPHONE;
that closed butcher might be, as in old Scotland, a flesher; the tobacconist here would be a cigarette handler. Outside the cigarette handler's was a cigarette machine. Edwin had a florin, so he was able to buy a packet of ten. No human intermediacy. That was a help. Flat to the glass of the door of a stationer's he saw magazines. There was the one Charlie had brought him:
Brute Beauty
. And there were others he had never seen before:
Valour; Act; Oh!
He rubbed his eyes, which were troubling him with an odd impairment of vision. Were those really
Air, Pride, Plume, Here?
He lit a cigarette (five matches left) and tried to steady his eyes by reading the advertisement cards in a glass case. Exotic Coffee-coloured Model 41 - 24 - 39, Available Afternoons. Annette, Specialist in Correction. Janice for Leather. Baby's Pram Going Cheap. Flatlet Suit Business Gentleman, Regret No Coloured.

Round the next corner he saw a big white milk machine.
He had sixpences. Excellent. An early breakfast, again without human intermediacy. He was delivered, to the flashing of lights, a clammy carton with a blue tear-off corner. He drank the cold milk gratefully, his eyes looking into the bitter morning sky which was still really a night sky. But the moon had set. A little farther down the street he saw a machine with six columns of chocolate. He fed in his last sixpence and drew out a block of Honey Nut Milkshake.

He chewed, sucking his clogged teeth. He had a threepenny piece and two pennies. That wouldn't get him far, would it? He couldn't even telephone without getting change. But, of course, he didn't want to telephone. Still chewing, an occasional milky belch rising (that, he thought, was appropriate to his woolly cap) he walked back to the wide endless thoroughfare. There were no art galleries or museums or libraries open at this time, were there? Bed was, at this hour, the only free entertainment for those who did not work. Lie-abed London. The cities of the East were aflame with life at this time of day. Edwin paused in his walk. He heard trains. One could wait warmly in a station.

He almost smelled his way towards the great terminus. The smell, he knew, should be of sulphuretted hydrogen, but his sick nose had sweetened it to something meadowy. He climbed a wide station yard to a Gothic cathedral skinned over with grime. Milkchurn-censers clanged; there was acrid incense; a hooter bellowed
Oremus
. In the huge hollow waiting-hall there were benches. He was glad to sit down. Thanked be Almighty God.

Angry people snarled out of local trains; there were a few, more placid, who meditated on the benches, awaiting
longer journeys. Edwin felt his head and feet equally numb. There was a disarray of newspaper near him on the seat. He had heard that stuffed newspaper made for warmth. It was the
Daily Window
, and it screamed at him as soon as he picked it up: JIVE GIRL DROPS DEAD AT WEDDING. More sedately it whispered that a thousand Japanese had been made homeless by an earthquake. Was it wholesome enough for improvised socks? he wondered. He thought he might fill his woollen cap with a thousand-a-week teen-age singer who had become engaged, but then thought better of it. He would be aware of the common little grinning mug pressed on to his baldness. He tried to make socks out of a page which gave advice on brassières to eleven-year-olds and another which was headed WE LIKE MUM AS SHE IS NO KIDDING. This he found too difficult, so he finally crammed cartoons into both shoes, thus making them a little snugger. But head and ankles were still cold. This was the great free world. He almost decided to return to the hospital.

He read his passport passeport 433045. Dr Edwin Cyril Spindrift, Lecturer, Born Whitby 25.2.21, Height 5 feet 11 inches, Colour of Eyes Hazel, Colour of Hair Brown. And there was a personable young man staring out at him, with a great deal of hair, a young man destined to go far, as far as Moulmein and farther. Edwin read all the visas with close attention, growing colder and colder. Then he noticed that there was, as an enclave of this terminus, a station of the Underground. It might, he thought, be warmer in there. As he walked across the waiting-hall he saw two elderly women look at his woollen cap and heard one say: ‘Poor young fellow. Ringworm.'

Edwin had fivepence. He had more: he had fivepence halfpenny. The fare to the station nearest the hospital was twopence. The machine gave him his ticket without commenting on his appearance by look or word. He was made free of a platform and a bench and given advertisements to read. It was moderately warm. Trains rushed in, hissed open then shut, rushed out, and he caught none of them. There was all too much time. He even managed to doze.