Cut and Come Again (11 page)

‘Get yourself dressed, man! I ain't running away with your clothes now, if I did then.'

She began to help him on with his clothes. He still had nothing to say, but once, as she was fastening the back buttons of his trousers and he stood with his face turned away from her, he gave me a half-smiling but inscrutable look, rich with devilry, his eyelids half-lowered and his lips shining wet with the wine.

And I began to understand then something I had not understood before.

My brother and I were at the hospital early, before nine o'clock. The waiting room, a high one-windowed room painted a dark green, was empty. And for some time we sat on the bench and did nothing but stare at the opposite wall. It was the bitterest day of the winter, the bitterest day I could ever remember, the streets black rivers of ice, the sky full of the bitterness of snow which seemed as if it would never fall. The fingers of my brother's broken arm had already gone dead, blue to the nails, with the great cold. He sat with the fingers of the other tightly clasped over the dead fingers, trying to warm them. It was all right, I kept thinking, we were first, we should be away in a few minutes. In some other part of the hospital a baby was crying. The fitful sounds echoed and reechoed down the empty corridors. Then suddenly the sound ceased. We listened for it to start again, but nothing happened. The whole place seemed empty and deserted, as though all the inmates had died in the night.

‘We could pinch the radium,' I said, ‘and get away with it.'

When we laughed the sound seemed sacrilegious. So we sat in silence again, waiting. All we had to do was to get an X-ray photograph of the broken arm, have the papers signed, and depart. I sat there with the papers opened ready in my hand.

For a long time nothing happened. Then we heard another sound, a sound of sawing. I glanced at my brother, who looked a little scared as he listened.

‘An operation,' I said.

‘Shut up,' he said. ‘There's someone coming.'

A moment later the door opened and in came a woman, followed by a man. They were working-class patients, the woman very small and thin as a whippet and about forty-five, the man much older and much bigger. He was like a prize-fighter gone to pieces. His hair and his face merged into each other, the same sickly grey colour. Both he and the woman sat down on the seat. The woman had a sort of sparrow's face, one of those perky colourless faces which twitter inquisitively and without rest.

‘What are you in for?' she said to us.

‘X-ray,' I said.

‘Some hopes,' she said. ‘You'll have to wait.' She spoke with a kind of dismal pleasure. ‘Everybody has to wait. Don't we? You!' She turned and spoke to the man. ‘Don't we have to wait?'

‘Eh?' he said. He lifted his hand to his ear.

‘Don't we have to wait?'

‘Hm.' I could tell he didn't hear.

‘He can't hear,' she said to us pleasantly. ‘He's stone deaf in one ear, and now the other one's going.' She seemed quite pleased about it all. ‘But it's his legs he comes in for.' Knowing he could not hear, she did not trouble to lower her voice. ‘He's filling up.' Her little face began to light up with acute pleasure. ‘Filling up. Water.'

‘What's he in for?' I said.

‘Massage. Electric.' I thought it seemed a curious treatment for dropsy, but I wasn't sure and I said nothing. ‘That's what I'm in for myself,' she said.

‘Are your legs filling up?' I said.

She looked at me with a kind of pitying disapproval. ‘What I've got,' she said, ‘ 'll never be cured.'

‘Oh, they'll cure you.' I said.

‘Never,' she said grimly. ‘I know. I've had everything. I know what they can do.'

She was trying to recite for us a list of all the diseases that had ever attacked her, from pneumonia with complications to floating kidney, when I felt the old man staring at me, trying to catch my eye. And after a moment I looked at him and he looked back at me, neither of us making a movement or a sign, until finally he lowered the lid of one eye.

The woman was still talking when the door opened again, and instead of the nurse I hoped to see another man came in. He sat down on the bench with an immense sigh, said ‘Good morning' to us breathlessly, and held one hand over his heart. He looked for a moment as if he were about to collapse. He was extraordinarily fat, with a very red, puffy, cherubic face, and he looked more than anything else like a publican who had lost his memory and had strolled in upon us by mistake.

‘Christ, ain't it cold?' he said.

‘Cold?' said the little woman. ‘You got no business to feel cold.'

‘Me? Why?'

‘Your fat keeps you warm.'

‘I wish it did,' he said. ‘But it don't. It ain't natural.'

‘It
looks
natural.'

‘Well, you don't
know
. I used to be as thin as you. Thinner. I was a walking hatstand.' And then: ‘Ain't they about yet?'

‘Who?'

‘The nurses.'

‘Internal patients first,' she said. ‘Then us. We can wait.'

He was silent, catching his breath in great wheezy
blowing gasps. And as though in sympathy, we all sat silent, staring at each other, sizing each other up.

And then, after a minute or two, the door opened again.

A nurse entered. I got up and held out the papers. ‘I have …' She lifted down the receiver of the wall-telephone hanging in the corner and began to hold a conversation in a high-toned, icy voice: ‘We are ready for you, doctor. Yes.' She was very tall, dressed all in white, and had a notebook in her hand. She was impersonal, a real ice-maiden, with her head high-up and a touch-me-not expression frozen on her face. Red-Face made signs to me as I stood waiting for her to cease telephoning, mute signs of comradeship and masculine sympathy. We were all listening to what she was saying, and she knew it. And knowing it, she prolonged the conversation. ‘But why should I? Well, if you like. Yes. That would be nice. I will. I know. It would be lovely.' Suddenly she hung up the receiver. ‘I have …' I began to say, but she opened the door and in a moment was gone.

‘She's nobody,' the little woman said.

‘You'd better tell her so,' I said.

I sat down, and then after a minute the door opened again, and in came a stubby man wearing thick spectacles and an iron and a spring on one of his boots. He sat down next to me. He sat quietly for a few moments and then began to unlace his boots.

‘Going to bed?' said the little woman.

‘Bed!' he said. He was speaking to us all, in a voice of bitter weariness. ‘I hope to Christ I never go to bed again.'

‘Oh?'

‘I been in bed a year!' he half shouted.

He took out a paper and began to read it savagely, in silence. I glanced over his shoulder. It was a journal of the fried-fish trade, and in it I could see advertisements for cod and Yarmouth herrings and fish-oil and ice. It was new to me.

‘Is that a good paper?' I said.

He was savagely silent.

And gradually his silence seemed to affect us all. We sat staring and waiting. Through the highest unfrosted panes of the window I could just see the sky, greyish black and full of the snow that seemed too bitterly frozen ever to fall. And we sat there in silence for a long time, nothing happening, no one coming, as though no one knew or cared we were there.

And then suddenly four nurses came in at once. They flounced in at one door, marched stiffly through the waiting room and out at the other door, a procession of ice-maidens, going by us as though we did not exist. The last of them was very tall, the tallest girl I had ever seen, and almost the thinnest. In her stiff white nurse's uniform she looked like some great carrot-shaped icicle. When she had vanished we all burst out laughing. The fat man as he laughed quivered like a red jelly. We had scarcely recovered before the door opened again and three other nurses came through, marching in procession, white and frigid, and disappearing like the other four.

‘The seven virgins,' I said.

In a second later came a doctor. He followed the nurses. He had a kind of lamp, like a miner's head lamp, strapped to his head. We waited for him to go and then we burst out laughing again.

‘It's an operation,' said the little woman.

‘It looks as if it's going to be very pleasant for him,' I said.

‘It
is
pleasant,' she said. ‘I've had three and …'

But we were all laughing like a pack of fools; and for the first time she couldn't go on.

The laughter was only silenced by the opening of the door. It opened slowly this time, and a nurse began to come in, backwards. I got up at once, almost out of habit, to say something to her, and then I saw that she was wheeling a carriage stretcher backwards, so that she could open the doors as she went. On the stretcher lay a woman between fifty-five and sixty. I thought at first that she was dead, but then I noticed that her eyes, which were the same dead grey colour as her face, were wide open and that she was looking at us as she was wheeled through. She had no expression on her face except one of blank terror. As the nurse wheeled her into the other room, the rubber tyres of the stretcher soundless on the wooden floor, she kept her eyes desperately fixed on us who sat waiting. It was as though she felt that we were the last fellow creatures she would ever see.

The nurse wheeled her through and closed the door. For a minute or two we were chastened, sitting silent, listening. I believe we all expected the woman to cry out. But nothing happened, and finally the little woman said to me:

‘Now's your chance. Catch her when she comes out.'

‘All right,' I said.

And I sat waiting in alert readiness, as a reporter waits to catch a public man as he comes out of a meeting. And when the door opened at last I sprang up. The nurse was flummoxed, and for the first time I succeeded in saying something.

‘I have come for an X-ray,' I said. I tried to speak nicely, with consideration for her, gently. ‘I have the papers.'

She took the papers and looked at them without speaking.

‘I should like to be able to go as soon as possible,' I said.

‘A broken arm,' she said. She spoke as though I were a horse. ‘Which arm?' she looked from one of my arms to another.

‘Oh, my brother's arm,' I said.

‘I see,' she said. I ceased in that moment to be as important even as a horse. She spoke to me as though I were a candlestick or a bed-pan or something she saw and handled every day of her life, her pretty pink lips thinning and widening into a half-smile of contemptuous tolerance of me.

‘You will have to wait,' she said to my brother.

‘We have been waiting a long time,' I said.

She went out of the room. After that we sat and waited again, the conversation giving way to periods of silence and the silence to the arrival of other patients. More and more people began to come in, so that we had to squeeze up to each other on the benches. At last a mother and her daughter arrived, the daughter wasted by some kind of paralysis of the arms and shoulders, so that she walked as though she were carrying a terrific and invisible weight across her back. Red-Face got up and gave his seat to the two women. ‘How is she?' said the little woman. The mother shook her head, secretly, without speaking, and the little woman kept her eyes on the girl, as though weighing up the symptoms of an affliction she herself had not yet had the fortune to contract, but as though she had hopes about it still. Once a nurse came in and
telephoned again and then went out again. Hours seemed to pass and finally we caught the fragrance of the hospital dinners, and I could tell by the angle of the icy light that it was almost noon.

I could bear it no longer. I got up, opened the door through which the patients came, and went along the corridors. After a time, meeting no one, I came back again.

‘The other door,' said the little woman. ‘Try the other door. They all go that way.'

I opened the other door and then stopped. The woman on the stretcher was lying in the half-darkened room, all alone. She was staring straight at me. The expression on her face had changed since I last saw her. She still had the same deathly grey colour, and her eyes still stared with desperation, but she had gone beyond terror into a kind of apathetic trance, almost childish, as though the interminable waiting had turned her mind. She stared at me without a change of that expression or a word and I stared back in return until I closed the door.

‘Nobody there?' said the little woman, as I sat down.

‘Nobody,' I said.

And we went on waiting.

Every Saturday morning, Osborn, the schoolmaster, and Eric, his only son, walked down into the town to buy fish for midday dinner. The Osborns had eaten fish, some sort of fish, for this same meal on this same day for fifteen years. Osborn himself knew the calory values of cod and plaice as he knew the multiplication tables, and he believed in the value of fish almost as much as he believed in the value of himself. He was a small, perky, jumpy man, dressed in black coat and black bowler hat and white hard collar: a magpie with pince-nez. The boy too wore glasses. They were over-large for him, the lenses thick and gold-rimmed; so that his eyes had a round shiny look of magnified vacancy and fear.

‘Hands out of pockets. Hands out. Hands out. Ha-nds ou-t!'

As they walked along Osborn snapped out abrupt commands, as though he were addressing an invisible class. He used a kind of verbal whip on the boy. Years of habit made him chip off the ends of his sentences, snap, clip, his lips like scissors: ‘Where you're going, where you're going! Before you leap. Many more times have I to say it, many more times? Hands out, hands out.' The boy was silent, his terror of his father expressed in speechlessness. Each time he was commanded he took his hands out of his pockets, but somehow they crept back again, like fish sliding back into water. They were thin white frozen hands. He could not feel the ends of his fingers for the frost. The wind came in gusts of ice along the street, cutting and whipping up harsh storms of frozen dust from the skin of black ice on the pavements.