The Doctor Is Sick (2 page)

‘Darling,' said Sheila. ‘Look, this is Charlie. It
is
Charlie, isn't it? That's right. I met Charlie in the pub and he was sweet enough to bring me round here. I wasn't too sure of the way in the dark.' Sheila had a slight unfocused look about her; her black hair was untidy; powder had caked on her face. Edwin could gauge, almost to the nearest cubic millimetre, how much she had been drinking. He didn't blame her, but he wished she hadn't picked up this Charlie.

Charlie took Edwin's right hand in both his large warm horny paws. ‘So you're Edward,' he said warmly in a furred Cockney baritone. ‘Your wife's been telling the whole lot of us in the public bar about you being ill. It's a real pleasure to me,' he said, ‘this is.' He was darkly coarsely handsome in a working-class best blue suit.

‘And he brought me all the way here,' said Sheila, ‘because I wasn't too sure of the way in the dark. And he's been so sweet. See what he bought for you. He would insist on stopping at the tube station bookstall to buy these. He said you'd want something to read.'

‘It's a real pleasure,' said Charlie, and he pulled from his
side-pockets bunches of gaudy magazines –
Girls, Form Divine, Laugh It Off, Vibrant Health, Nude, Naked Truth, Grin, Brute Beauty
. ‘Because,' he said, ‘your wife here tells me you're a reading man, same as I am myself, and nothing passes the time better when you're ill than a good read.' He fanned one periodical open, as in demonstration, and male and female nudes grinned wanly, postlapsarianly, under the ward ceiling lights. ‘Let's sit down, shall we?' said Charlie, and Edwin, feeling he was being a bad host, led his visitors over to his bed. ‘Now,' said Charlie, ‘what is it your wife here says that you do?'

‘Linguistics.'

‘Aha.' The three of them sat, leg-swinging, on the bed. ‘
I've
never heard of it,' said Charlie, ‘and that's a fact. Mind you, I'm not saying there's no such thing, but no mention of it has ever come my way before.'

‘Oh,' said Edwin, ‘it does exist.'

‘That's as may be, but, if it does exist, it'll be above the heads of people like me and her.' He jerked his head towards Sheila. ‘Me, I clean windows. Anybody can understand what that is, and you don't get put into places like this one if you do a job like that. Mind you, you can get put into a hospital if you're a window-cleaner, but not in a hospital like this one, because window-cleaning doesn't affect the brain. Not, that is, if you're made as you can do the job. Some can't do it, and I should think it's more than likely that you yourself couldn't. I'm not trying to be insulting, but every man to his trade. If you got up there on a ladder you'd as like as not get froze. I've seen these young ones just starting – “tumblers” we call them – get froze stuck up there on a ladder, and nothing that anybody can do can get them down if they're not ready to
come down. What I mean is, they can only get unfroze of their own accord. I remember hacking away at the hands of one of these tumblers, twenty storeys up, who'd got himself froze. It was a very high wind, and there I was on the window-sill hacking away at him with the side of my hand, but nothing I could do could get him unfroze.'

Edwin was an acrophobe. His head began to spin, and he gently lowered his feet to the floor.

‘And what are they going to do, darling?' asked Sheila.

‘They're going to do tests,' said Edwin. ‘I suppose they're going to try and look inside the brain.'

‘You keep them off that,' said Charlie. ‘If you're not crackers already they'll make you crackers. Then they shut you away and you can't get out and you can't convince anybody that it's all been their fault, not yours. Your brain's your own property and you don't want them fiddling about with it. Catch them trying to see inside my brain,' he said with scorn. ‘Very delicate piece of machinery the brain is, not unlike a watch or a clock.'

An Indian sister with a moustache and sideboards came up from behind and said: ‘Meesees Speendreeft? Doctor would like a word with you in the office.'

‘If they're trying to get your permission,' said Charlie, ‘to do things to his brain what they otherwise wouldn't dare to do, you just tell them no. Just that, no. The shortest word in the language and one of the most telling.' But Sheila had already gone to the large glass tank of an office at the end of the ward.

‘On a point of information,' said Edwin, ‘that isn't the shortest word in the language.' He felt that, shorn as he was of everything but pyjamas, a bed, and a water-bottle, he had to confront this dark horny window-cleaner with a
show of the only authority he had. ‘The indefinite article,' said Edwin, ‘in its weak form, of course, is the shortest. It's a single phoneme. I refer, of course, to the form of the indefinite article used before a word beginning with a consonant.' He felt better after saying that. But Charlie said:

‘A fine girl, your wife is. I say “girl” without intending any offence, meaning more a woman or perhaps a young woman, according to opinion. I'd say she was about the same age as you, and I'd give you thirty-eight, although you've still got a good head of hair. She came into the public bar at the Anchor today and beat Fred Titcombe at darts. She's drunk pint for pint with me. You've got to hand it to her.'

Edwin felt rising another of these unwonted fits of irritation which showed him that he was sick. ‘You don't see my point,' he said, ‘about the indefinite article. And you don't even ask me what a phoneme is. And I'm quite sure you don't know.'

‘Well,' said calm Charlie, ‘that's neither here nor there, is it? It's not to the purpose, so to speak. There's lots of things I don't know, and it's too late to start learning them now.'

‘It isn't, it isn't.' Edwin held back a gush of tears. ‘You know perfectly well it's never too late.' Some of the nearer visitors, longing for the bell to ring them out, having said all, and more, that they had to say, looked towards Edwin hopefully. But, in check, he sat down quietly on the bed again, blinking back the water.

‘You'll be all right,' said Charlie. ‘You mark my words. You'll get over it and be as right as rain.' Sheila came back at that moment, too bright, too cheerful. She said:

‘Well, it seems that everything's going to be all right, there's nothing to worry about at all.'

‘Is that all,' asked Edwin, ‘that he wanted to tell you?'

‘Well, yes, pretty well. He says that you're going to be perfectly all right. That's what he said.'

‘Just what I've been telling him,' said Charlie. ‘And I'm no doctor.'

A Nigerian nurse, her head an exquisite ebony carving, came in with the bell. ‘All visitors out,' she said, ‘if you don't mind.' Relief stirred down the ward. Sadly Edwin saw that his wife was only too ready with her kiss, her promise to come the next day, her quick swirl of lipstick for the healthy world outside. Charlie said:

‘You read those books I brought you. Keep you cheerful. Stop you brooding about things.'

With the departure of the visitors a sigh of quiet satisfaction seemed to be exhaled through the ward: the bell had rung out what were, after all, aliens. They were, with their bright voices and natty clothes, the frivolous world. Now everyone could go back to the serious business of disease, disease being ultimately the true human state. Grapes and magazines from the alien world lay untouched for a time, time for them to become acclimatised, assimilated. The near neighbour of Edwin, who had had no visitor, who had sat unmoving on his bed, smoking thoughtfully, now spoke to Edwin for the first time. Through a twisted immobile mouth: ‘Your wife's a real smasher,' he sneered. ‘I like them like that. Brunette, too.' Then he sneered in silence.

CHAPTER TWO

Edwin drew the thermometer from the warm pit where it had lain, read it, and handed it to the nurse. ‘Ninety-eight point four,' he said.

‘You are not supposed to know your temperature,' scolded the nurse. She was a grim sallow Slav, large-footed. ‘You are not even supposed to know how to read the thermometer.' She frowned over his pulse, threw his wrist away, and recorded the evening data. ‘Have you your bowels open?' she asked.

‘Yes,' lied Edwin. Otherwise, what purgative horrors might she not devise? ‘Very much so.'

‘It is not necessary to say that. To say yes is enough.'

‘Sorry,' said Edwin. And then he added, as she moved away:
‘Spasebo, tovarisch.'

‘You need not thank me. It is my duty. Besides, I am not Russian.'

Edwin lay back, his bedlamp flooding warm on his face. He leafed through one of Charlie's gifts, page after page of nudes. Nude; naked. These were nude, not naked. It worried him that he could grow more excited over the connotatory differences between the two words than he could over the nude, or naked, flesh itself, in reality or in representation. Dr Mustafa, plump dark interrogator in the Tropical Diseases Clinic – whither Edwin had first been sent – had worried about that too. ‘Can you feel no desire for your own wife? For anybody else's wife? For any woman at all? For nobody?' Then he had leaned
forward in quiet excitement. ‘Not for boys? Not for goats?' There was a true scientific approach. ‘And how about fetishes?' Dr Mustafa had asked. ‘Shoes? Underwear? Spectacles?' Dr Mustafa had sighed deep, deep, deep commiseration. ‘Something has gone wrong with your libido. It is very sad.'

Indeed very sad. Vicariously sad, though. The man who had overcome tobacco addiction was universally congratulated. Was this other, though involuntary, loss of an appetite of a very different order? Yes, because, despite Barrier's whimsy, nicotine was not a lady. A lady was not nicotine. One's wife was not a packet of Senior Service. It was, therefore, vicariously sad.

Edwin stared, though now unseeing, at a nude named (why the quotation marks? he had wondered) ‘Felicity'. He thought not of felicity but of fidelity. He and Sheila had long ago agreed that sexual infidelity was not really infidelity at all. You could accept a drink or a cigarette from somebody, why not also an hour or two in bed? It was the same sort of thing. Even when she had not been able, for some obscure reason of fancy, to reciprocate a friend's or stranger's desire for her body, she had always been willing to lie still, be the passive food for that appetite,
‘Ça vous donne tant de plaisir et moi si peu de peine.'
A favourite slogan of hers. The real infidelity, according to her, should draw to itself total and ultimate condemnation, unforgivable, the sin against the Holy Ghost. To prefer just to
be
with somebody else, to engage of one's own free will in spiritual intimacy with another, that was true adultery.

It had been easy enough to accept this view of morality with one's brain, thought Edwin. It was when promiscuity
changed from a concept to a percept that trouble began. Curious how women, so irrational, could exalt reason, could be genuinely puzzled that even a doctor of philosophy should want to bring out a knife when he actually
saw
, actually
heard
. Edwin had actually seen, actually heard, only once, and that had been fairly recently, in a hotel in Moulmein. Sheila had sweetly forgiven his rage; after all, the failure of his libido had already taken place; he was not quite normal.

What Edwin now feared was that his marriage would fail completely because choice had been taken away from her, her right to choose between his bed and all the others in the world. She needed a base from which to conduct her forays; she might now, without deliberately searching for it, find a new one. Edwin did not believe that anyone in any hospital, neurologist or psychiatrist, could put anything fundamental right. The libido had failed for good; the latest phase of one's personality must always be the final phase; he wanted to ensure that he never fell down unexpectedly again while lecturing on folk etymology, but if he smelt cloves as peppermint who was to say that he was wrong? And though he worried vicariously about the end of his sex-life, the test of the durability of his marriage must surely be taken on this very issue. Some day, all marriages had to become sexless, but then they usually had more than fifteen years to look back on. Thirty-eight was (Charlie had been right in his estimate) much too young to pack all those instruments away.

The sneerer next to Edwin was already asleep, toiling hard in it. At intervals he would announce a football result, the scores fantastic.

He really preferred, Edwin decided, being worried over
the loss of sexual desire to being cured of this loss by people like Dr Railton. He knew this was unreasonable and ungrateful, but he felt that, in feeling that, his right to choose was being vindicated. Then he remembered that it was this very right to choose that was being denied Sheila. He was very confused. Then, into the darkened ward with its few burning bedlamps, tiptoed Dr Railton, as if to come and resolve the confusion. Dr Railton smiled. He said:

‘I'm glad you're not asleep yet, Mr Spindrift. There are just one or two little things——'

‘We'd better get this business straight,' said Edwin. ‘This business of honorifics. I'm
Doctor
Spindrift.'

‘Doctor?' Dr Railton looked wary: delusions of grandeur setting in?

‘Yes. I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Pasadena. For a thesis on the semantic implications of the consonant-group “shm” in colloquial American speech.'

‘Semantics,' said Dr Railton. ‘You didn't do very well with that “spiral”, did you?'

‘I wasn't intended to do very well,' said Edwin.

‘Now,' said Dr Railton, sitting on the bed and speaking softly, ‘I'm going to tell you a little story. Then I want you to re-tell the story in your own words. Right?'

‘Right.'