The Doctor Is Sick (26 page)

‘I'm very grateful,' said Edwin, ‘for what you did then. I'm afraid all this adds up to rather a long story.'

‘That,' said seated Chasper, ‘I can well believe.' Dreamily he said: ‘Professor Harcourt, of sainted memory, was arrested in a public lavatory in Nottingham of all places. Showing photographs to people, would you believe it? Well,' he said, throned homburg-crowned, holding his newspaper sceptre, ‘I'm glad we've had this little talk. You don't by any chance know what happened to my curly-brimmed bowler, do you?'

‘I wish I had it now,' said Edwin. ‘It's terribly draughty up here.'

‘Well, do drop in again sometime,' said Chasper. ‘I'm sorry I have to hurry you out like this, but I've some business to do, tolerably urgent. So glad to have been of use.'

Edwin shot back the bolt, nodded to Chasper, and went cautiously out into the great bare sanitary hall, loud with the fall of waters. Cautiously he surfaced to the street. No Bob. No Bob's car. But here too was the fall of waters. Rain. The first English rain he had seen since the day of embarking for Burma, having come home to hospital in a time of drought. It was heavy rain. The sensation of its needling on to his bare scalp was strange, rather eerie. He hurried to the doorway of a shop, a luminous smart shop full of comptometers. The doorway was already occupied by a pair of lovers, their embraces rustling against the plastic of their rainwear. The plastic lovers, he thought.
And then, he thought, he'd forgotten to touch Chasper for a couple of bob. For a cuppa and a wad, guv, and a packet of fags. Fags he had still aplenty. He lighted one. All Chasper had given had been a pennyworth of sanctuary. Brassbold, Harrystonebold, Edwin tapped the male lover on his embracing arm. ‘Give us a bob for a cuppa and a wad, guv,' he whined. The male lover impatiently gave poor bald Edwin a couple of sixpences and a threepenny piece. Then he returned, plastically rustling, to his kisses.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A long narrow gallery full of pleasure machines. Edwin stood outside, looking in without pleasure. The brittle needles of rain on his skull were telling him telegraphically that he was near the end. The angels of rain were announcing his tiredness, loneness, hunger for his own kind, sense of self-betrayal, anxiety about the future. He had done for himself proper, he had that. And in the pleasure gallery loud jaunty music distilled, above the rifle-cracks and ball-clicks and cries of hope and frustration, the very essence of clownish sorrow. ‘Come on in out of the wet, Dad,' said a man in a white coat, white but not clinically white, not white enough for the goddesses of radiography. Edwin fingered his coins, the gift of a lover. One of the sixpences had the worn bald head of Edward the Seventh – a silver floweret thrown from a heated Pullman in which a hundred-egg omelette had been served; full brandy-flasks in ulster pockets; braces of grouse in the racks;
Rosenkavalier
waiting at Covent Garden. Edwin entered a very different world now. The young and loose-mouthed squandered their pennies at curious games of chance. One, called
H-Bomb
, offered money back for the destruction of the whole world. A trigger sent ball after ball down swift channels, bumping against resistances that doused successively the lights that were Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi, Athens, Rome, Berlin, London. With the extinction of New York, the whole globe shuddered to silence, the player got his penny back. And, Edwin saw,
there was a torture game – a cube of glass with a doll inside on a rack; squeeze the trigger hard enough and strength was rewarded with a most realistic scream. And there was a most compulsive game in which the player battled against lung cancer (diagram of chest and bronchial tubes with flashing lights for zones of infection). And a game for two players reproduced in symbols of prophetic fire the struggle between Red China and the rest of the world. Edwin shuddered and turned to a Rotamint machine. He fed in his Edwardian sixpence, saw wheels whizz and numbers flare; then stillness. He fed in the other, deutero-elizabethan, and, after some seconds of busy mechanic gestation, the tinkling of the birth of the jackpot could be heard. It drew eyes from other machines, even a few spectators for Edwin's gathering of the silver harvest. ‘Fackin' lacky,' said a youth. Who else had been that? Of course, Nobby of the Kettle Mob, only jailed, not fined nor naffink. Edwin counted six shillingsworth of sixpences. Good. But was it really good? A kip for the night, leaning on a rope that collapsed promptly at dawn, a slab of bread and marge, and then what? Living for the day, Christlike. But these impoverished improvident sects had always sprung to birth in warm climates, where living for the day was possible. Edwin walked out into the cold and wet night, giving courteous thanks to the filial man who had invited him in. He went the way whence he had come, collar turned up and hands in pockets. The lovers were still in the doorway but had reached an embrace of such excruciating intimacy that Edwin hesitated to pay the man back his cold piece of charity. Edwin turned the corner by the buried lavatories and came to a mammoth Edwardian hotel. The bar was announced in lights as open to non-residents.
Here would be his last drink. Then let him become finally passive, an ultimate thing, and the agencies of the world take over. His hemlock or viaticum. A double whisky. An olive or so or brittle crisps. Or vinegary gherkins.

Edwin swung in through the swing doors to find handsome or prosperous men buying liqueurs for slim ladies on bar stools with back rests, ladies with ragamuffin hair of cunning cut and elegant stretched legs. The bar was long and lit like a high altar, above it a canopy of intricate carving. The barmen were grave, thin-haired, soft spoken and swift at their priestlike tasks. They inclined to the drink-buyers with smiles of natural deference. Suddenly shy, Edwin turned down his collar, tried to smooth a head already, God knew, smooth enough, and made for the glow of GENTLEMEN. No mere Gents here, no mean apocope. In a fine palace of marble and glass with alabaster steps to the row of urinals, Edwin met an agency of the world – the broad back of a man in a dinner suit, upon his head a coronal of vine leaves, turning with fastening fingers to show to Edwin a fat face with blue chins, the tempering of a nose fitter for lean-headed yelping eagles. ‘My God,' he said. ‘What have they done to you? Who got hold of you, tell me that? You're so changed, Spindrift.'

Well, there it was. Perhaps the movement of life, which so often meant surprise meetings, was specially helped on by the peculiar atmosphere of mass lavatories. For so many meetings in lavatories could be fateful: that with the lurking corruptor in childhood; the man with addresses and pictures; the anecdotalist who became a friend; the two strangers discussing one's wife; one's boss met when one was being chased by a flagellate kettle-mobster; this
man from one's past here, buttoning, crowned with vine leaves. ‘Jack Thanatos,' said Edwin. ‘Well.' And he grinned at what Jean Cocteau could have made of this encounter.

‘Aristotle Thanatos,' said Aristotle Thanatos. ‘I don't know where you people ever got the Jack from.'

‘I think,' said Edwin, ‘it was to protect you from the vulgar and uninstructed. Aristotle, to the British, has always had a ring of the unclean.'

‘Yes, yes, and what have you been doing since our college days? I, for my part, went into wine, which you may or may not have heard. That's why I'm here now. A convention of vintners. A conference on the promotion of Greek wines here in England. And upstairs, now, the wines are being drunk.'

‘Words,' said Edwin. ‘Words, words, words,'

Aristotle Thanatos became instantly irritated. ‘It is not words,' he said. ‘It is the truth. You come upstairs if you don't believe me. Come upstairs anyway.'

‘No, no,' said Edwin. ‘I referred to my own studies.'

‘All right, don't then. You weren't always so bad-mannered,' said Aristotle Thanatos. ‘Is this change of personality something to do with your baldness? And that, I may say, is in very bad taste. It's not at all suitable, not at all.' His accent had absolutely no hint of foreign waters. He smelt Britishly prosperous: Trumper's Eucris, Yardley's after-shave pamperings, mild tobacco, no garlic.

‘What I meant,' said patient Edwin, ‘was that my studies have been ever-increasingly in the field of words, and that I'd love to come upstairs with you and taste the wines.'

‘Why didn't you say so at first?' said Aristotle Thanatos. ‘Though, I'm afraid, there's no real tasting going on now.
People are drinking. Wine-tasting is, please remember, a serious and daytime pursuit.' He led Edwin from thelavatory, throwing half a crown in the attendant's dish, and walked him up a wide flight of shallow stairs with liquidly yielding carpet and shining rods. Edwin heard vinous noises and song. Aristotle Thanatos pushed in one of the heavy doors and waved Edwin to a heartening sight: drinkers of golden wine from goblets, not glasses, and the wine itself poured from Hellenic jars. In the centre of the huge Edwardian room was what looked like a press, and girls with lifted kirtles crushed grapes with exquisite feet, while men with strong noses stood about, laughing and clapping. Here was drunkenness, but only the holy drunkenness of the wine-bibber. A gross man dressed as Bacchus staggered round with lifted cup, clapping shoulders, kissing girls with straight noses, shouting. But, gloomy, his lips parted to show so many teeth missing, circulated the room none other than 'Ippo, 'Ippo in a sort of ancient Athenian costume, artificial grapes instead of a cap, carrying his sandwich-boards. The back-board said FILL HIGH THE BOWL WITH SAMIAN WINE. As 'Ippo circled towards Edwin and Aristotle Thanatos the fore-board became visible: TAKE A LITTLE WINE FOR THY STOMACH'S SAKE. 'Ippo's secular and religious functions had at last fused. He recognised Edwin with no surprise, saying: ‘Had all your hair off,' and then, ‘Right bleedin' job this is. Not a drop of wallop to be got nowhere.' He continued to circulate. Aristotle Thanatos beckoned a bare-legged girl with a delightful Cypriot profile. She came smiling with a crown of vine leaves for Edwin. ‘Now,' said Aristotle Thanatos, ‘you see the names under which some of these wines will be
marketed. Heroic names, you see.' There was a displayboard with proofs of labels: Odysseus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax.

‘Ajax won't do,' said Edwin. ‘Ajax was the name of the first water-closet. Hence jakes. But come, let me sample the vintages.'

The wines were bright, some resinous, some smoky, all palatable. ‘But tell me,' said Aristotle Thanatos, ‘what precisely do you
want
to do with your life? You don't seem to be doing too well in your present position, do you? Bald, for instance. Your trousers cheap and ill-fitting. Your shoes cracking. Your toilet, to say the least, sketchy. Fill the bowl with Samian wine and come and sit over here and tell me about it. Are you married? You are. Are you earning enough money? Don't answer, because I can see that you are not. Are you happy with your words? Presumably you are, else you would not submit so tamely to your present condition of baldness and, to say the least, inelegance. Where are you living? Where is your place of work? Have you any children? A car? Don't attempt to answer all those questions at once.' A charming girl of the Golden Age came up with a tray. ‘Try one of these,' said Aristotle Thanatos. A
dolmas.?
Edwin took a vine leaf parcel of mint-flavoured rice and meat, ate it with zest, and took another before the tray passed on. ‘Yes,' said Aristotle Thanatos, ‘I can see that you're hungry, too.'

Edwin explained the baldness plausibly. Aristotle Thanatos nodded, sighing with a sort of relief; the baldness had evidently troubled him. Edwin said he was not particularly anxious to return to lecturing on Linguistics in Moulmein. He did not explain why: the scandalous life of the last three days, the rude word spat at innocent
televiewers, the chase that ended in a closet with Chasper. He had the feeling that Aristotle Thanatos was going to offer him a job.

‘We require, you see,' said Aristotle Thanatos, ‘somebody capable of running a sort of public relations office. Somebody much-travelled, a linguist, with broad general culture, in touch with the best people, charming, well-groomed.' He gazed sadly at Edwin. ‘It is such a pity.'

‘Look,' said Edwin, ‘I'm not always like this. You should see me when I'm got up proper.' He gaped with horror at this locution, as did Aristotle Thanatos. In touch with the best people, eh? Edwin smiled it away, a joke, a solecism deliberately used, not unknown among the best people. ‘ 'Andsome I look,' smiled Edwin desperately, ‘with a big 'ead of curly 'air.' He laughed loudly and gripped Aristotle Thanatos's chubby well-tailored knee. Aristotle Thanatos looked gloomy and said:

‘I see, I see, I understand, a joke. Well, I think that you might come to see me sometime when you're feeling a little better. Obviously you're not yourself at the moment. I don't blame you, poor fellow. I don't suppose you've really changed all that much, fundamentally, have you?' He brought his shiny black eyes close to Edwin's, as though conducting an ophthalmic examination. ‘I don't know, I don't know,' he said. ‘At college you were very different, weren't you? You had, I remember, at least four very good suits. And they've been playing around with your brain, have they? A great pity, to say the least.'

‘I still have excellent suits,' said Edwin. ‘I have six. But they all happen to be in Moulmein.'

‘Moulmein,' said Aristotle Thanatos. ‘Rather a disreputable town, as I remember. That was during the war,
however. I was in the RAF, you know. Well now, Spindrift, have another drink or something. I'm just going over there to stop Mr Thalassa from falling into the wine press. A charming man, Spindrift, but inclined to gaiety.' And he patted Edwin like an old wet dog and started to go off. Mr Thalassa was making the movements of a sea swimmer, wine dripping from his goat's beard. Edwin said, gulping: ‘Jack.'