The Doctor Is Sick (16 page)

‘I don't much care for smoked salmon.'

‘I've got one or two other things in the fridge. But smoked salmon's what they call a delicacy.'

‘Look here,' said an irritable voice behind Bob. ‘Go and talk about smoked salmon somewhere else. I want to get through to my wife, I do.' Bob turned in the lazy-eyed style of a mobster, saying:

‘You go and get stuffed.' Then he gripped Edwin's right wrist and led him from the threshold of the telephone-box. Edwin saw that his best chance of escape was to follow unresisting. The station vestibule was crowded now, and the ticket machines were merry with the song of coin. Just coming into the station was the young city man who had borrowed Chasper's curly bowler. He was wearing it, but, on seeing Edwin, he doffed it, saying:
‘There
you are.'

‘I'm awfully sorry,' said Edwin, ‘but I just haven't got your pound deposit. I spent it, I'm afraid. Perhaps you could return the hat tomorrow.'

‘Oh,' said the young man. ‘I particularly wanted that pound. Not for tonight, it's true, but certainly for tomorrow morning. I got the job, you see. This hat was a great help. I looked in the pub but you weren't there. I was going to come back later.'

‘All right, all right,' said Bob impatiently. ‘If it's a question of paying out one solitary nicker.' He loosed Edwin's wrist to get his wallet out. Edwin saw his
opportunity and dashed. He pierced a slow-moving slobber of youths who were about to enter a
Ristorante Italiano
. These then became a curtain, indignant when Bob tried to part them. Edwin ran past the DISCBAR, a shop proclaiming TEENJEANS, and turned the corner into a sloping side street with a pub. A taxi stopped, and its passenger opened the door. ‘In, quick,' said Les. ‘Come on, in, quick. I'm late already. Bloody curtain's gone up.' Edwin mounted, panting thankfully.

‘The less you see of that bugger, the better,' said Les. ‘I know what he was after. Where do you want to be dropped?'

‘Take me along with you,' said Edwin, ‘for God's sake.'

‘You weren't too well, were you?' said Les. ‘You passed out earlier on, remember. Tight, that was your trouble. You shouldn't drink like that when you're just out of hospital. Do you think you could do a job or are you still incapable?'

‘When? Tonight? What sort of a job?'

‘Crowd scene. End of the third act. Where they lynch this poor bugger. Sings all the time he does, while they're lynching him. See,' said Les, glancing out of the rear window, ‘that's his car. He sticks to it, I'll say that for him. When he wants a thing he goes for it. If he doesn't get you it won't be his fault.' Edwin looked too, seeing only headlights. ‘It's him all right,' said Les. ‘That's his number. Right,' he instructed Edwin. ‘You just dash in when you get there. You'll get in all right if you say you're from the University. That's where they're getting the crowds from. And I'll hold off this geezer. Bob Courage, his name is. Courage, eh? Don't make me laugh. That's the name of a good beer.' He dug in his pocket and extracted a mound of
copper for the fare. ‘Got this from the cardboard box under the bar,' he said. ‘While the rest was following your corpse upstairs. Only a loan, of course. Pay it back tomorrow or the next day.'

The taxi had stopped among smells which, Edwin knew, should be of chrysanthemums and cabbage-stumps but which his nose swore were of mint-drops. The taxi was throbbing waiting while Les leisurely told the coppers in his hand. The following car seemed to have been delayed, probably by traffic-lights. ‘You get in there now,' said Les. Edwin got in, explained his provenance and mission, and was thumbed uninterestedly onwards to stairs that led apparently to a cellar. Cellars were playing a big part in his life. Edwin looked about him, open-mouthed at the vast mechanics of opera. Men fly-walked high above on the grid; there were wheels being turned and cohorts of switches being touched. In the distance an orchestra played all out and a tenor yelled above it. An offstage choir waited to sing, its conductor squinting anxiously at the score, and a man sat, waiting, at an organ. ‘Down there,' said someone peremptory to Edwin, pointing, and Edwin walked, it seemed, a mile, past huge walls of scenic flats to the cellar stairs.

Deep in the earth was a great cold tomb full of people and property-baskets. The people were young and arrogant-looking; evidently students. ‘You're late,' said a willowy man to Edwin. ‘Come on now, everything off.'

‘Everything?' Edwin looked anxiously about, but could see no women. They, perhaps, were herded together in a different tomb.

‘Everything. Including that little woolly cap.' And, with a delicate pincering of thumb and finger, the man himself
lifted off the cap, then started back on seeing Edwin's nude scalp. ‘But,' he said, ‘that really is marvellous. There was no need to go to all that trouble, you know, but that is something that really can be used. You must certainly go right at the very front. The trouble,' he said, glancing round disdainfully at the students, ‘is that all these people have too much hair. That looks unnatural in a crowd.' The students began to titter, with students' bad manners, at Edwin's baldness, but the willowy man rebuked them in a schoolmasterly way. ‘You,' he said, ‘have nothing whatsoever to laugh about. You all look far, far too young. A lot of stupid callow youngsters pretending to be a mob.' The students pouted sulkily. They were all dressed, Edwin now had time to notice, in a variety of Victorian garments. Some wore artificial whiskers whose adhesive strength they ever and anon tested gingerly; some had Karl Marx beards; a few even had watch-chains across their waistcoats. All had hats.

‘I don't see that about the hair,' said Edwin. ‘I mean, they all cover it up anyway, don't they?'

‘Yes, they do,' said the willowy man testily. ‘But they have to uncover right at the end, don't they? When the news of the death comes through. But you,' he said, dressing Edwin skilfully, ‘are going to be uncovered all the time. That head is much too good to be blotted out with a hat,' Edwin did not like to ask what the opera was called or what it was about. The music had sounded contemporary and, in a vague way, British – Elgarian themes wrestling with discords. He would ask one of the students. Soon Edwin found himself in a gaffer's smock with a clay pipe and a crook and heavy boots that fitted ill. It worried him that his woollen cap had been tossed away somewhere.
Apart from anything else, that cap was the hospital's property, not his. He was stroked with grease paint and liners and given white whiskers to stick on. Now he looked vaguely aged: he would, literally, pass as such in a crowd.

Edwin asked an Indian student what it was all about. This Indian had also been cast as a lowly farm operative and Edwin could see that he resented it as colour prejudice. ‘It is called,' he said with some distaste,
‘Presbury Newton
, and it is written by an English musician called Emery Turnbull.' He paused an instant. ‘Or,' he said, ‘it may be the other way round. It may be
Emery Turnbull
or even
Turnbull Emery
written by Newton Presbury.' He paused again, seeing other possible permutations, but went on to say: ‘It is of no consequence, anyway. It is not very good. It is a piece of fictitious American history in which a state governor falls in love with the wife of another man. The other man is jealous and angry and he takes a shot at the governor while the governor is travelling in a train to make a speech somewhere. The governor's life is despaired of, and the mob, which is us, drags his – as it proves assassin from the jail and lynches him to loud music. Then the governor dies, but a new railroad is opened up, and a treaty of perpetual peace is made with some Red Indians. The Red Indians also provide a sort of ballet. It is very dull.'

‘But, surely,' said Edwin, ‘peasants didn't dress like this in America, did they? I mean, America's never had any real peasantry, has it?' He brandished his crook and wondered if there had ever been sheep in America.

‘The negroes, yes,' hissed the Indian. ‘A slavery, not a peasantry. And the frivolousness of the whole approach to the subject is shown by these costumes that we have to
wear – costumes which have never, at any time, been worn in America. Frivolousness,' he said, in a more resigned tone, ‘will be the death of Western art, such as it is. Then perhaps it will learn the sweetness and strength of Indian monody in music and of stylisation in the representative arts that avoids the vulgarity of overmuch naturalism and the mistakes attendant on it. Like this,' he added, and he indicated his own peasant's smock, lifting his brown Aryan head disdainfully.

Edwin looked round at the discarded clothes of the lynch mob, which was about fifty strong. He licked his lips at the sight of all those shirts and socks and ties. There was even a soft hat or two. His imagination luxuriated at the thought of all the money that must be in those trouser pockets, the pounds and silver of fat student grants. With a shock he found himself no longer squeamish at the thought of stealing. Then he had a vision of wigs. This theatre must be full of them. He salivated with a profound hunger for, at least, the appearance of normality.

‘Now,' said the willowy man, lifting a long forefinger. ‘I shall be away for a little while. I don't want any of you people leaving this room and going out to get drunk and perhaps wandering on to the stage in the middle of any of the love duets. I want you to stay here and remain
sober
. Cards I do not object to, nor any other
quiet
pastime such as reading. But nothing boisterous or
hobbledehoyish
. Do I make myself clear?' He went off. Two minutes later Edwin also went off, quietly, with his clothes and shoes under his arm in a little bundle. The hospital cap had disappeared. Never mind. Wig soon. Nobody noticed him leave, as many became engaged in a kind of rugby game with something or other they found in the
Salome
basket.

Edwin wandered quietly round at stage level but saw Les nowhere. The orchestra was playing a kind of railway scherzo during a sweating scene-change, and various eminent Victorian Americans – people, Edwin presumed, with a separate line each in the vocal score – were coming from dressing-rooms and waiting in the wings. One of the male principals said: ‘Bloody awful opera it is,' in a Welsh accent. It was certainly a very long opera if the first act was anything to go by. Edwin wavered like an old man, leaning heavily on his crook, towards the dressing-rooms. Most of the doors were open and all the rooms were empty, save where one tenor sprayed his throat and trilled abominably afterwards. Another room seemed inhabited by an ectoplasmic wraith of cigar-smoke. Edwin entered softly here and, to his delight, found a very good white shirt and a pair of nylon socks on a radiator. On the dressing-table, under hideous bright bulbs, was a small pile of signed photographs. Edwin could not read the signature, but he disliked at sight the podgy smirking face, consciously celebrated, and he looked for other things to steal. Money seemed somehow vulgar, barefaced, so he chose a ring from a ring stand and put it in his smock pocket. Stepping out of the dressing-room he paused, undecided. Then there was the fortissimo of a flushed cistern, a lavatory door opened, and a woman displaying opulent breasts, possibly from her largeness the heroine, came swinging out in a flowing robe. Edwin bowed low and took over the lavatory. He stripped himself, then put on the stolen garments. The shirt was somewhat loose at the collar, and Edwin saw in the mirror for an instant an ancient literary celebrity – Aeschylus head and tortoise neck, probably O.M. Still, it didn't look too bad. He left
the smock on the lavatory seat, opened the door and peered out. Nobody there.

As he walked gently away from this star region he encountered, with a sudden shock, an ancient and formidable-looking woman, dressed in châtelaine black and trodden-down slippers. ‘Well,' she said, chewing roundly, ‘and what might you be after?'

‘A wig,' said Edwin truthfully.

‘Oh, a wig,' said the woman, mollified. ‘What size and what colour, might I ask?'

‘I take seven in hats, I think,' said Edwin. ‘And, oh, any colour you like.'

‘It is not a question of what you or I like,' said the old woman, ‘but of what is wanted by them as knows. You don't know much about wigs, and that's a fact. You'd better come with me.' Edwin followed her to a store which smelt of matches, interpreted by him as human hair. ‘An awkward sort of shape of a head,' said the old woman, still carrying on with her rotary chewing. She tried him with a full-length Adonis, Caroline ringlets, Jerry Cruncher spikes. ‘How about this one?' she said finally. It fitted well, reddish Byronic curls. Edwin regarded himself in a fine old blue mirror. Quite the little poet. ‘Thank you,' he said. ‘Thank you very much indeed.'

He was now in a great hurry to get out, but the old woman was inclined to gossip. ‘No tunes like the old ones,' she said, chumbling, ‘either for sweetness or catchiness. Lot of noise it is nowadays.' To confirm this, the orchestra lurched into a long-held chord of twelve notes, all of them different, very loud. ‘Mark my words,' said the old woman, ‘the rot set in with them Germans – Andel and Waggoner and such. Sweet old airs there was
before, as none of them nowadays could go nowhere near.'

Edwin excused himself and left. Suddenly he found himself caught up in a rather podgy gang of Red Indians, giggling before they made their choral entry. They waved tomahawks at Edwin, and one said, in a refined voice: ‘How about a nice spot of scalping, old boy?' Edwin grew frightened. This, of course, was the medical staff of the hospital, all dressed up. There, surely was Railton, and that chief of many feathers was Begbie, all expert in scalping. ‘How,' said the chief in greeting, now clearly not Begbie. But Edwin fled.

Outside in the street a car, familiar to Edwin, was parked, a toffee-golden French loaf gleaming under the lamp. Bob was there, too. ‘Thought you'd be out sooner or later,' he said. ‘Now we'll go and really see about that smoked salmon. And the other things as well. I've got some lovely things to show you,' he said, gripping Edwin by the upper arm. ‘Didn't fool me a bit,' he said, ‘wearing that lot up there. I'd spot those eyes a mile off. Kinky, they are. We're two kinky ones, that's us.'