Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [29]
Seventeen
It amazed me, in retrospect, when I considered how readily I had been engaged: no questions put, no references asked for. Perhaps I inspire confidence. I had never in my life before attempted to get a job. Getting a job was something which my friends occasionally tried to do, and which always seemed to be a matter for slow and difficult negotiation or even intrigue. Indeed, it was the spectacle of their ill success which, together with my own temperament, had chiefly deterred me from any essays in this direction. It had never occurred to me that it might be possible to get a job simply by going and asking for it, and in any normal state of mind I would never even have made the attempt. You will point out, and quite rightly, that the job into which I had stepped so easily was in a category not only unskilled but unpopular where a desperate shortage of candidates might well secure the immediate engagement of anyone other than a total paralytic; whereas what my friends perhaps were finding it so difficult to become was higher civil servants, columnists on the London dailies, officials of the British Council, fellows of colleges, or governors of the B. B. C. This is true. I was nevertheless feeling impressed, at the point which our story had now reached, and not only by my having got the job, but also by the efficient way in which I turned out to be able to perform it. I was what was termed an orderly. My hours were eight to six, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch, and one day off a week. I was attached to a ward which specialized in head injuries and was called Corelli' in accordance with the Hospital custom of calling its wards by the names of wealthy benefactors: Mr Corelli having been a soap manufacturer from Sicily whose son once received a fractured skull through driving his Lancia when under the influence of drink in the Uxbridge Road. His child restored, the elder Corelli had acted with suitable generosity, and hence the name of the ward in which I had now been working for four days. My tasks were simple. When I arrived at eight a. m. I took a mop and bucket and cleaned three corridors and two flights of stairs. These surfaces were easy to clean, and I achieved spectacular alterations of colour with the help of a little soap. After this, I washed up the crockery of the patients' breakfast which was stacked up waiting for me by now in the ward kitchen. Corelli occupied three corridors, one on the ground floor called Corelli I, and two on the first floor called Corelli II and III. The ward kitchen was in Corelli III, and it was here that my activity centred, and in a cubby hole next to the kitchen that I left my coat, and retired to sit and read the newspapers should there ever be a spare moment. After the washing up I went and fetched the cans of milk from the main kitchen, which was known as the Transept Kitchen, and took them back to Corelli III on a trolley which I brought up on a special service-lift. I enjoyed this bit very much. To reach the Transept Kitchen I had to walk quite a long way through the corridors of other wards with strange names; and as I walked quickly along, passing unfamiliar people in white coats, they on their tasks and I on mine, I felt like a man entrusted with an important mission. When I got back to Corelli I was allowed to perform an operation of almost clinical significance, that is to warm the milk on the big electric stove and pour it into mugs which the nurses took to those of the patients who were allowed to have it. After that I cut bread and butter and then washed up the mugs and saucepans and cleaned the kitchen. I was still more than a little nervous of my colleagues and superiors and very anxious to please. With the nurses, who were mainly young Irish girls without a thought in their heads, unless obsession with matrimony may be called a thought, I immediately got on very well. They were calling me 'Jakie' on the second day, and treating me with an affectionate teasing tyranny. I noticed with interest that none of them took me seriously as a male. I exuded an aroma which, although we got on so splendidly, in some way kept them off; perhaps some obscure instinct warned them that I was an intellectual. With the Ward Matron I got on well too, though in a different way. The Ward Matron was so august a person, so elderly and austere and with such a high notion of her own dignity, that the possibility of certain frictions was removed simply by the social distance which lay between us. My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person. The only question which I raised was whether or not I did my work well and kept out of the way; and as I did these things she showed her approval by ignoring me, except that on the first occasion on each day when we passed each other in the corridor she would turn her head very slightly with a faint intensification of expression which if produced almost indefinitely might have become a smile. Beyond the Ward Matron into the stratosphere of the Hospital hierarchy my vision did not extend. It was with the intermediate portions of my small society that my relations were most uneasy. Under the Matron were three Sisters, one for each of the Corellis, and it was from these beings that I directly received most of my orders. The lives of these women, already far advanced, were made a misery, on the one hand by the Matron, who treated them with unremitting despotism, and on the other by the nurses who repaid them with continual veiled mockery for the pains which the Sisters, in order to recoup their own dignity, felt bound to inflict upon those beneath them. The Sisters found me hard to understand. They suspected me of wanting to score off them, not only because of my friendly relations with their enemies the nurses, but because, more than anyone else with whom I had contact in the Hospital, they divined something of my real nature. I presented them with a problem that made them nervous; and for them alone of all the women with whom I had to do in that place, I indubitably existed as a man. An electrical current passed between us, they continually avoided my eye, and when they gave me orders, their high-pitched voices went a semitone higher. I was particularly fond of the Sister of Corelli III, which was the one with whom I had most to do, who was called Sister Piddingham and known to the nurses as The Pid. The Pid must have been about fifty, or perhaps more, and many years might have passed since she had started dyeing her long grey hair black. Her voice and eyes, made sharp by verbal warfare and professional habits of critical scrutiny, followed me continually as I worked in the kitchen. Her very anxiety to criticize me made a bond between us; I should have liked to have done something special and unexpected to please her, such as bringing her flowers, but I knew that she took me seriously enough to be capable of construing this as an act of condescension and hating me for it. For the sad mystery of her mode of existence I felt a respect which almost amounted to tenor. The only other Hospital people of whom I saw anything were a man called Stitch, who was a sort of resident head-porter, who was very stupid and hated me heartily, and one or two ward maids who were more or less semi-deficient. Every day at lunch time I would buy sandwiches at the Transept Canteen and then go and fetch Mars from Dave's flat: sometimes then I would catch a glimpse of Dave, from whose face the astonishment that had appeared there when I had first told him of my job had not yet completely faded; and I would tell myself that the whole thing would have been well worth it even if it were only for the sake of giving Dave such a jolt. Then I would return with Mars to sit in the garden outside Corelli I and eat my sandwiches. The garden here consisted of a long smooth lawn with two rows of cherry trees planted in the grass. I knew they were cherry trees because the nurses were always exclaiming about what the garden looked like in the spring. I would sit under one of the trees, while Mars bounded about close by, giving his attention now to one tree and now to another, and the young nurses of Corelli would come and gather round me like nymphs and laugh at me and say that I looked like a wise man sitting cross-legged under my tree, and admire Mars and make much of him, and defend me against Stitch, who would have liked to have forbidden me to have Mars in the garden at all. I enjoyed these lunch times. It was in the afternoon that I managed at last to see something of the patients. But this wasn't until the later afternoon. I looked forward to this all day. In my apprehension of it, the Hospital declined through a scale of decreasing degrees of reality in proportion to the distance away from the patients. They were the centre to which all else was peripheral. The patients in Corelli were all men, and all in a variety of conditions resulting from blows on the head. Some of them had concussion with or without fractured skulls and others had more mysterious capital ailments. They lay there with their turbans of white bandages and their eyes narrowed with headache, and watched me as I mopped the floor; and I felt for them a mixture of pity and awe, such as an Indian might feel for a sacred animal. I should have liked to have talked to them, and once or twice I did begin a conversation, but on each occasion one of the Sisters came and stopped it. It was felt to be improper for orderlies to address patients. What contributed yet more to the numinous aura with which the patients were surrounded was the fact that although I was close to them all the day I never saw them except in their full dignity of sick people, lying there solitary and silent with idle hands, privately communing with their pain. That at other times they were washed and fed, used bed pans, and had bloody and pus-soaked dressings removed from their shaven heads, I knew only at second hand by inference from the dirty dishes and other less savoury objects which entered more directly into my day's work. When the nurses and doctors were engaged on their priest-like tasks the doors of the rooms were religiously closed and notices displayed forbidding entrance. It was only occasionally that I would pass in the corridor one of the patients being wheeled to or from his bed on a trolley; and whenever I heard the dull rumble of the trolley wheels, with a heavy sound of rubber on rubber, I would contrive to emerge from wherever I was and catch a glimpse perhaps of some new arrival, whose face and newly bandaged head, still fresh with astonishment from the outside world, would convince me that after all the patients were men like myself. After I had cleaned the rooms there was an interval in my work, during which I would retire into my cubby hole where there is just room to sit, and read the evening papers by a dim electric light. There was no window in the cubby hole, and as all the walls were covered with people's coats hanging on pegs, it was rather like the inside of a wardrobe. I didn't mind this, as the insides of wardrobes have always had, since childhood, a peculiar fascination for me, no doubt for reasons known to psychoanalysts. I did, however, dislike the dim light, and on the second day provided, at my own expense, a more powerful electric light bulb: which was confiscated on the third day by Stitch and the dim one put back again. There I sat, perusing the Evening Standard, and, as I read, the rumours of the outside world came to me like distant cries or the sounds of battles far away in time and space. Lefty's name occurred quite often; and once a whole editorial was devoted to him, couched in terms designed to suggest simultaneously that he was a serious public menace and that he was a petty street-corner agitator who was beneath contempt. I noticed that a grand meeting was to be organized by the Independent Socialists in West London in a day or two, and it was apropos of this that the editor was calling on the optimates to exercise this peculiar blend of negligence and strong measures. Homer K. Pringsheim had held a press conference in London at which he had said that the British and American film industries had much to learn from each other, and had departed for the Italian Riviera. Others names which I looked for were not there. I enjoyed this part of the day too. By this time I could combine a considerable feeling of tiredness with a feeling which was almost entirely new to me, that of having done something. Such intellectual work as I have ever accomplished has always left me with a sense of having achieved nothing: one looks back through the thing as through an empty shell; but whether this is because of the nature of intellectual work as such, or whether it is because I am no good, I have never been able to decide. If one no longer feels in living contact with whatever thought the work contains, the thing seems at best dry and at worst stinking; and if one does still feel this contact the work is infected through it with the shifting emptiness of present thought. Though it may be that if one had any present thoughts that were at all considerable they would not have this quality of emptiness. I wonder if Kant, as he conceived his Copernican Revolution, said to himself from time to time, 'But this is nothing, nothing'? I should like to think that he did. I had decided to wait for the weekend before making another attempt to contact Hugo. The sense of my own destiny, which had so curiously deserted me during the days when I had been lying on Dave's camp-bed, had now returned, and I felt sure that whatever god had arranged for me and Hugo to have deeply to do with one another would not leave his work unfinished. On this matter I felt for the moment a certain calm. I was more anxious about letters from France, and perhaps most anxious of all about Finn, of whom there was still not a breath of news. Dave had said that we ought to start making inquiries, but this was impossible for the simple reason that there was nowhere where we could inquire. Finn had no friends in London, so far as we knew, except ourselves, and concerning his present whereabouts we could not even get as far as framing a theory. Dave had suggested going to the police, but I was against this. If Finn was drinking himself to death somewhere, that was Finn's business, and it would be my last sad act of friendship to leave him to it. This worried me all the same, and I thought a lot about Finn during those days. The other unsolved problem which I had upon my hands was the problem of Mars, and about this I worried in fits and starts. Sadie and Sammy had still made no move, and their silence was beginning to get on my nerves. I felt tempted at times to go and see Sadie and talk the whole thing over. But I felt afraid of this too, partly because, au fond, I was a bit afraid of Sadie, especially now when I had put myself in the wrong, and partly because I didn't fancy the idea of Mars being taken from me. I didn't want Mars, in his old age, to fall into the hands of someone, viz. Sammy, whom I suspected of having little enough respect for an unexploitable life, even if it were a human one. So I did nothing and waited. A day or two passed, and it was some time in the late afternoon. In about half an hour my day's work would be over. Owing to my exceptional diligence it was virtually over now, only although there was nothing further for me to do I could not leave the building until six o'clock had struck. In a few minutes, I was thinking to myself, I would go and mop the kitchen floor; one could never mop round that kitchen floor too often. But for the moment I was in no hurry. I felt very tired; and it was becoming clear to me that this was indeed the main drawback of this otherwise fascinating job, that it was extremely tiring. At some time in the future, I decided, I would arrange the work, whether here or elsewhere, only half-time. Then in the other half of the day I might do some writing. It occurred to me that to spend half the day doing manual work might be very calming to the nerves of one who was spending the other half doing intellectual work, and I could not imagine why I had not thought before of this way of living, which would ensure that no day could pass without something having been-done, and so keep that sense of uselessness, which grows in prolonged periods of sterility, away from me for ever. But all this was for the future. Just then I had no idea but to continue with my tasks and wait for my destiny to catch up on me. That it would do so I felt confident; though as I idly turned the pages of the Evening Standard, standing up because the light was so bad, I had no notion how fast it was galloping at that very moment to overtake me. I saw from the paper that Lefty's great meeting had taken place earlier that day, not without considerable disturbance and the final interference of the police. There were several pictures of mounted policemen controlling crowds. Someone had thrown a magnesium flare and two women had fainted. Lefty had made a speech which, so far as I could see, was filled with harmless and boring remarks about the technicalities of affiliating left-wing organizations to each other. A well-known Trade Union leader who was a member of Lefty's party had made another speech, also a woman M. P. who was not a member but very pretty. As I was looking this over I heard the swing doors which led on to the main corridor being opened, and then the rumble of the trolley wheels. A new patient was being brought in. Through the glass door of the cubby hole I saw The Pid pass by, and heard her black heels click away down the ward corridor. I opened the door and held it ajar, standing just inside. Stitch was pushing towards me the trolley on which, under the red blanket, a figure lay prostrate. Stitch caught my eye and jerked his head angrily to indicate that I had no business to be hanging around and watching. He did not speak to me, in accordance with an unwritten rule that hospital servants do not speak while they are wheeling patients along corridors; but his eyes spoke volumes. I returned his look with all the insolence I could muster. Then I lowered my eyes to the face of the man on the trolley, which was at that moment passing in front of me. The man on the trolley was Hugo. His face was dead white and his eyes were closed. A darkly stained bandage encased his head. I stood there rigid. Then the trolley had passed. I stepped back inside the cubby hole and closed the door and leaned against it. A conflict of emotions filled me. My immediate feeling was one of guilt; like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his father. I had a curious sense that it was because of some neglect of mine that Hugo had been struck down. Together with this I experienced immediately a certain gratification at the thought that as soon as I had ceased to look for Hugo he had been knocked on the head and brought to me. I was still smarting a little from his casualness to me at the studio. But this idea had no sooner formed that I was overcome with remorse, and nothing mattered to me except the question of how badly Hugo was hurt. I came out into the corridor. They had put Hugo into a single room right at the far end. I saw The Pid emerging and coming back. I followed her into the surgery. 'What's the matter with the big fellow?' I asked. 'Is it anything bad?' There was nothing unusual about this question; I asked it about every new patient that came into the ward. 'I've told you before not to come into this room,' said The Pid. She would never call me by any name. 'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I'm just going. But is it bad?' 'You ought to be doing your work,' said The Pid. 'I shall ask Stitch to see that you have more to do.' I started to go. Then when I was half out of the door she added, 'He had a brick thrown at him at that meeting. He's got concussion. He'll be here about five days.' 'Thank you!' I said, and slid out as smoothly as a fish. A great concession had been made. I went into the kitchen and started mopping the floor. Stitch came in and made a number of remarks which I scarcely heard. I was wondering what to do. I had to see Hugo. It was an odd trick of fate that although we had been brought together it was under circumstances which made communication virtually impossible. We were placed here in the one relationship that totally debarred any exchange. I ran over a hundred possibilities. By an unfortunate chance tomorrow was my day off; so that if I wanted to see Hugo in the ordinary course of my duties I should have to wait until the time when I should clean his room on the afternoon of the day after tomorrow. Even then I should only be able to be with him, for, at the most, fifteen minutes; and in any case this was too long to wait. It was always possible that by then, if Hugo's injuries turned out to be very slight, he might have left the Hospital; but quite apart from this, I could not bear the idea of waiting so long. Hugo had been brought to me and I had to see him at once: but how? There then occurred to me a further difficulty, viz. that Hugo was unconscious. I cursed to myself as I ran the mop savagely in under the cupboards. Stitch had gone away. I wondered if it would be possible to alter my day off, or to offer to work tomorrow in any case; and then to creep into Hugo's room some time during the morning. This would be very difficult, with nurses and doctors continually on the prowl. And would I be allowed to work tomorrow, even if I offered to? The matter would be referred to Stitch, who would be certain to divine that I wanted it, and so to declare it impossible. If I had had a bit more time I might have thought out some way of inveigling him into imposing it on me as a penalty: but it was too late for this now. As I was debating one of the nurses came in. She was the most Irish of the nurses, with a voice that constantly reminded me of Finn. I asked, 'How is the big fellow?' 'He's after shouting for a meal!' said the nurse. When I heard this I made up my mind what to do; and indeed there was only one thing possible. That was to come back to the Hospital in the middle of the night. This idea filled me with a kind of religious terror while at the same time it fascinated me very much. I had never seen the Hospital at night, though I had often tried to picture it. To the terrors of its imagined silence and solitude was added the sense that my presence there at such an hour would be a sort of sacrilege. If I were discovered I would, I felt sure, be shot down at sight. There could be no mercy. But it was necessary to come. The proximity of Hugo was already raising in me a tornado which could only be stilled by his presence. I had to see him. I put away the mop and took off my white overall, thinking fast. It was now after six. I had to contrive the details of my plan at once, for if there were any preparatory steps that needed taking they must be taken now. How was I to get into the Hospital? I pictured the place, and it seemed to me like an impregnable fortress. The main entrance was open all night, but very brightly lit, as I knew from having passed it by at all hours when going to Dave's flat. A night porter would be certain to be on duty and would stop me and ask my business. I thought of various lies I might tell, but none of them seemed plausible enough to ensure my being allowed in without anyone else being put on my track. Then there was a back door which led out of Corelli I into a yard where coal and bicycles were kept. This was the door which I normally used. But I knew, from something that Stitch had said, that this door was locked at ten; and doubtless the same applied to any other back doors the place might turn out to have. There was always of course the entrance through the Accident Wards, where emergency cases were brought in. But this entrance would be garrisoned too, so that there would be precious little chance of slipping through unobserved; and one mistake would be fatal. The only possibility was to come in through a window; and if I were going to do that, I must decide which window to use, and go and open it straight away. I put on my coat and began to walk slowly down the main stairs. My head was in a turmoil. The side of the building which faced the bicycle yard had lights upon it which were kept burning all night. Anyone trying to enter from the yard would be clearly in view from the street. The ends of the Transepts came into the radius of the street lamps, and the main building had its own row of lamp-posts which encircled the main courtyard. There remained the Transept gardens, which were wells of darkness. Most of the windows which opened on to these gardens were the windows of patients' rooms. It was impossible to think of entering through one of these; for even if I had had the nerve to go now and satisfy myself that one of these windows was open, I had certainly not the nerve to re-enter through it at two a. m. and run the risk of being pursued by the screams of some nervous inmate. There were other possibilities, such as the scullery window of Corelli I. But this would fall too much under the eye of the Corelli I Night Sister, whose room was next door to the scullery; and the same objection applied to the other windows which led from the garden into the administrative rooms of the ward. My only hope lay in the more anonymous and public parts of the Transept, round about the Transept Kitchen. It was true that there was likely to be somebody in and around the kitchen all night; but there was a number of cloak rooms and store rooms round about which seemed to be derelict and unvisited even during the day, and whose windows lay at the very end of the garden, where it would be darkest. On reaching the bottom of the stairs I turned, with an air of conspicuous casualness, towards the Transept Kitchen. When I am up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions. I felt sure that the expression of my face must be betraying me, and whenever I passed anyone in the corridor I turned this tell-tale surface in the other direction. I walked firmly past the door of the kitchen. The upper half of the door was made of plain glass, and out of the corner of my eye I could see figures moving about within. I selected a door two or three farther on, and turned into it sharply. I had remembered right. It was a store room, against each wall of which the iron frames of bedsteads were leaning ten deep. I closed the door quietly behind me, and walked down the aisle in the middle of the room. In a square of sun and shade the garden was revealed and the rows of cherry trees. The shadow from the Corelli side fell sharply across the lawn, and cut it into two triangles of contrasting greens. I stood for a moment looking out. Then I unlatched the window. It was a simple casement window with one catch halfway up the frame and a perforated bar at the bottom which regulated the aperture. I unpinned the window and undid the catch, opening the window an inch or two, so that the catch rested against the glass on the outside. I didn't want the window to look as if it were undone; and on the other hand I wanted to be certain that I should be able to pull it open from the outside when the time came. It took me some minutes to satisfy myself that both these conditions were met. Then I marked the position of the window carefully in relation to the rows of trees. After that I went back and listened at the door until I was sure that there was no one in the corridor. I emerged, closed the door, and walked back towards Corelli. No one had seen me. A moment later I was leaving the building.