Mantissa (15 page)

He jerks around. “I am not in the least sc—”

It is only a small fist; but the right uppercut is delivered from deep by her waist, and not only with all the vigor of a young woman who, though not an athlete in the normal sense, evidently takes a pride in her general physical trim, but rather more surprisingly with professional precision and timing, crisp to the point of the jaw. One might almost suspect it is not the first time she has delivered such a punch. Clearly it gains most effect from coming, like one of her father’s allegedly preferred form of guided missile, so out of the blue. Mr. Miles Green’s head is knocked visibly back. His mouth drops open, his eyes glaze and lose focus, he wavers, then slowly sinks to his knees; tries for an unsteady moment to stand again; but finally, aided by a very firm heel-push from a bare and delicately arched left foot, keels over on the old rose carpet and lies inert.

M
NEMOSYNE’S
daughter stares down at her victim, reflectively licking her still clenched knuckles. After a few seconds, the traditional (if not on this occasion counted) ten, she steps over the body and walks briskly to the side of the bed, where she presses the bell. From instant boxer – the very moment her fingertip touches the plastic stud – she becomes instant Dr. Delfie again. The white tunic, the pocket of pens, the name-tag, the hair bound severely back (the chaplet has vanished, like the chiton on the clock) by the discreet wisp of black-and-white scarf, each detail is restored. And so also is the former cool severity of expression. She is no longer either tender or teasing.

And now, retransmogrified, she walks back to the prone man and kneels by him. Like a ringside doctor, she lifts a wrist to take its pulse. Then she leans over the face – he has collapsed sprawled on his back – and opens the lids of an eye clinically. Suddenly the door opens.

An elderly staff sister, evidently of the stern and no-nonsense kind, stands there. There is something about her, an air of peerless officiousness, of knowing better than anyone else in her world what that world is about, that tells all, even before she speaks. She stares down disapprovingly through bespectacled, humorless eyes. The doctor is evidently taken by surprise. Rather awkwardly, for one so generally graceful, she scrambles to her feet.

“Sister… I thought Nurse Cory was on duty.”

“So did I, doctor. As usual she’s nowhere to be found.” Her eyes flick down at the patient. “And that’s also as usual, I suppose.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’m short-staffed enough as it is. His sort cause more trouble than the whole of the rest of the ward put together.”

“If you could find a male nurse and a stretcher. We’d better get him back to bed.”

The staff sister gives a bleak nod, but still stands surveying the unconscious patient, as she might an unwashed bedpan.

“You know my opinion, doctor. They need hormone treatment. If not surgical intervention. That’s how we’d have dealt with it in the old days.”

“I do know your views, sister, thank you. You were kind enough to communicate them to us at some length at the last ward meeting.”

The staff sister bristles.

“I have the safety of my nurses to consider.”

The doctor folds her arms.

“I am aware of that, too.”

“I sometimes wonder what Dr. Bowdler would think if he were still alive. The things that go on now in this hospital in the name of medicine.”

“If you’re referring to all the new advances –”

“Advances! I know what I’d call most of them. It grows more and more like Bedlam.”

“Would you please find a male nurse and a stretcher?”

The sister does not budge.

“You may think I’m an old fool, doctor, but let me inform you of something else. I’ve been meaning to speak about it. These walls. They’re unscrubbable. There’s filthy, disgusting dirt in every single crevice of them. They’re crawling with septicemia. It’s a miracle to me that we haven’t had epidemic after epidemic here.”

“I’ll see if I can’t arrange one for you, sister.”

This is too much. The staff sister leans angrily forward.

“And don’t you come the sarcastic with me, young woman. I’ve had more clever little would-be specialists through my hands than you’ve had hot dinners. You think you know everything, your generation. I’d like to remind you that I was dealing with cases like this when you were still in nappies.”

“Sister –”

But the dragoness is unstoppable.

“Half the patients in this ward are no better than malingerers. The last thing they need is kid-glove treatment from half-baked young doctors hardly out of medical school who –”

“Sister, I know you’re going through a difficult period of your –”

“That has nothing to do with it!”

“If you go on like this I shall have to speak to Matron.”

No good: the sister draws herself proudly up.

“Mrs. Thatcher happens to share my views. Both on discipline and antisepsis.”

“Is this meant to be an example of discipline?”

“Don’t you talk discipline to me. This ward has gone to wrack and ruin ever since you were assigned to it.”

“By which I presume you mean it’s only half the concentration camp it was before I came.”

It is immediately apparent that this overeager attacking move is into a trap. The sister shifts her gaze to a point beyond the doctor’s head, and speaks with the dignified moderation of one about to plunge a knife into a hated colleague’s back.

“Better a concentration camp than a striptease show.”

“What do you mean by that?”

The sister still fixes the far wall with her pinlike eyes.

“You needn’t think I don’t know what went on in the Demonstration Theatre the other afternoon.”

“What went on?”

“You know very well. It’s all over the hospital.”

“I do
not
know.”

“Dr. Lawrence’s new mastectomy incision.”

“What about it?”

“I hear it was demonstrated with surgical crayon upon your naked bosoms.”

“He could hardly do it on my clothed ones.” The sister gives a profoundly skeptical sniff. “I merely happened to be passing when he looked out for a volunteer subject.”

“Before twenty-four male students. If I am informed correctly.”

“So?”

The sister’s eyes suddenly blaze – if a glaucous grey can blaze – upon the doctor’s.

“I am told the last thing most of them appeared to be studying was the line of the incision.”

Dr. Delfie smiles, but very thinly.

“Sister, I should go to the dispensary and ask for two thirty-milligram Dembutoprazil tablets. And while you’re about it, perhaps you could also do what I originally rang for.”

There is a malignant light in the pale grey-green eyes behind the spectacles.

“We shall see… doctor. We shall see.”

And with that parting shot, the intemperate sister – the “doctor” is nearer a spit than a word – withdraws. Dr. Delfie remains staring after her for a second; then in one movement her hands come to her hips and she turns sharply. She stares down at her unconscious patient. Her next action is highly unmedical. Her right heel swings back and she gives the prone body a deliberate and sharp jab in the side, indeed with a force and precision that suggest she might be as good a soccer player as she is a pugilist. The effect of this kick of life is instantaneous. Miles Green abruptly sits, holding the place that has just suffered, and with no appearance at all of having just emerged from a syncope.

“That hurt.”

“It was meant to. That was a foul, despicable trick.”

“I thought she was rather fun.”

She points angrily down. “I rang for Nurse Cory.”

His face assumes a blandly innocent expression of surprise.

“But I thought Staff Sister was your idea.” Dr. Delfie stares at him; then suddenly her heel swings back again, and he finds himself the recipient of an even more violent kick. This time he manages to parry its worst force. He clears his throat, and gives a winning little smile of confession. “Just an impromptu notion.”

“Oh no it wasn’t! She was line-perfect. You’ve been holding her up your sleeve ever since the beginning, in your usual… it was a deliberate attempt to throw me.”

“You handled it jolly well.” He smiles, but she does not.

“And
sister.
You needn’t think I missed that, either.”

“Missed what?”

“That miserable real sister of mine.”

“Sheer coincidence.”

“Will you stop treating me like a cretin! Those spectacles didn’t fool me for a moment. I’d know those wretched fish-green eyes a mile away. To say nothing of the ghastly holier-than-thou attitude. Always nosing around for dirt, what she calls dirt. Saying it’s her moral duty, her obligation to history. Prurient old sow.”

“Honestly. I did have someone else in mind.”

“And as for that infantile and totally gratuitous bit of smut about my exposing myself to… it’s not just that you’re so tasteless, so lacking in any sense of how lucky you are even to glimpse me, let alone be allowed to touch me, and as for… it’s hopeless. I give up.” She goes straight on. “When I think of the hours and hours I’ve… and over something that’s… I must be insane.” He opens his mouth to speak, but again she jumps on. “It could have come to a perfectly happy ending twenty minutes ago.” He raises his hand gingerly to his jaw. “Before that. When I asked to sit on your lap.”

“You only wanted to prove who’s boss.”

“If you weren’t so entirely tone-deaf to the subtler nuances of language you’d have noticed that I used the admittedly rather hackneyed and sentimental, but nonetheless in this context clearly signifying, at least in the linguistically sophisticated circles to which we are supposed to belong, expression ‘to kiss and cuddle.’ ”

“I did notice.”

“When women say that they mean affection.” She stares darkly down at him. “I don’t think you’d recognize an olive branch if you were sitting in a whole orchard of the things.”

He lies back on the old rose carpet, his arms crooked behind his head, and looks up at her.

“What your interesting stylistic run-down leaves out of account is that you deliberately chose a moment when you knew I would have to reject it.”

“I dispute that totally. All it was was a moment when you had to make a tiny leap of the imagination.”

“Through your hoop.”

She comes a step closer, and folds her arms over her tunic, staring fiercely down at him.

“Look, Miles, it’s time we got one or two things straight. Since you so aptly compare yourself to a performing dog, all right, in the silly games part, all that nonsense, I let you off your lead. I know childish minds have to get rid of their aimless energy somehow. But the role-playing, the joking, the pretending I haven’t even heard of Tzvetan Todorov and hermeneutics and diegesis and deconstructivism, all that’s over now. When it comes to literary things that need true maturity and experience, like endings, I make the decisions. Is that clear?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“And you can spare me the sarcasm. I must remind you that you are an entirely chance and very transient biological eventlet and that –”

“A what?”

“You heard. A microscopic nothing, an amoebic drone, a lost bluebottle flying through the hall of eternity. Whereas I happen to be a female archetype with an archetypally good sense, developed over several millennia, of deeper values. On top of that you know as well as I do that my physical presence here is purely illusory, a mere epiphenomenon resulting from certain electrochemical reactions taking place in your, if you really want to know, pathologically hypertrophied right cerebral lobe. Moreover –” She stops and takes a breath. “Take your hand off my ankle.”

“I just wondered if archetypes had ankles.”

“If you move it one inch higher, I shall give you a much harder kick.”

He removes the hand. “You were saying?”

“For all your only too palpable faults and inadequacies, I did have some faint hope that you might one day with my help grasp that the very least your selfish, arrogant and monotonously animal sex owes mine for all its past –”

“Please not that again.”

“Cruelties, is a little affection when we ask for it.”

“I.e., a screw.”

She stares down at him; then slowly reaches down a pointing finger, as if it were a pistol whose trigger she is about to press. Her voice is lower.

“Miles, I warn you. You’re on the very edge of a precipice.”

“In that case I withdraw the colloquialism.”

“What did I say I wanted?”

“Affection. I’ll remember next time.”

She folds her arms again, and looks across the room. “As a matter of fact I came to a decision during that last scene. There’s not going to be a next time.”

The cuckoo clock ticks away in the silence provoked by this ukase. He begins to smile.

“Who says?”

“I say.”

“As you yourself have just informed me that you are not actually standing there, you are inside my head, I’m not at all clear how any decision about our future can lie with you alone.”

She throws him a sharp glance down. His eyes and mouth do not bother to conceal a smug amusement. But never, in the long history of the expression, can a smile have been so swiftly wiped from a face. One moment he quietly crows; the next he sits violently up, mouth open in astonishment. From sitting he kneels, groping wildly in the empty space that, two seconds before, she filled. She has entirely disappeared. He stands, hands once more desperately floundering through the air around him. He looks hastily around the room, crouches to look under the bed, then around the grey walls again.