Murphy (19 page)

‘One of the innumerable small retail redeemers,’ sneered Miss Counihan, ‘lodging her pennyworth of pique in the
post-golgothan
kitty.’

But for Murphy’s horror of the mental belch, Celia would have recognised this phrase, if she had heard it.

Miss Counihan brought her letters together with the sound of a sharp faint explosion and marched back to her place. Neary fetched his chair resolutely to the head of the bed, in very fair imitation of a man whose mind is made up. And Wylie sat down with the air of a novice at Divine Service, uncertain as to whether the congregation ceasing in a soft perturbation to stand is about to sit or kneel, and looking about him wildly for a sign.

All four are now in position. They will not move from where they now are until they find a formula, a
status quo
agreeable to all.

‘My dear Mrs. Murphy,’ said Neary in a voice dripping with solicitude.

‘If one of you would tell me simply what you want,’ said Celia. ‘I cannot keep up with fine words.’

When Neary had finished it was dark in the room. Simplicity is as slow as a hearse and as long as a last breakfast.

‘Errors and omissions excepted,’ said Miss Counihan.

Wylie’s eyes began to pain him.

‘I am a prostitute,’ began Celia, speaking from where she lay, and when she had finished it was night in the room, that black night so rich in acoustic properties, and on the landing, to the infinite satisfaction of Miss Carridge.

‘You poor thing,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘how you must have suffered.’

‘Shall I put on the light?’ said Wylie, his ravenous eyes in torment.

‘If you do I shall close my eyes,’ said Miss Counihan. ‘It is only in the dark that one can meet.’

Few ditches were deeper than Miss Counihan, the widow woman’s cruse was not more receptive. But Celia had not 
spoken and Wylie was raising his arm when the calm voice resumed its fall, no less slowly than before, but perhaps less surely. He withheld his hand, the little temporary gent and pure in heart.

‘At first I thought I had lost him because I could not take him as he was. Now I do not flatter myself.’

A rest.

‘I was a piece out of him that he could not go on without, no matter what I did.’

A rest.

‘I was the last exile.’

A rest.

‘The last, if we are lucky.’

So love is wont to end, in protasis, if it be love.

From where he sat Wylie switched on the light, the high dim yellow glim that Murphy, a strict non-reader, had installed, and glutted his eyes. While Miss Counihan on the contrary closed hers with an ostentation that flattened her face, to show that when she said a thing she meant it.

‘I cannot believe he has left you,’ said Wylie.

‘He will come back,’ said Neary.

‘We shall be here to receive him,’ said Miss Counihan.

Her cot had a high rail all the way round. Mr. Willoughby Kelly came, smelling strongly of drink, knelt, grasped the bars and looked at her through them. Then she envied him, and he her. Sometimes he sang.

‘Neary and I upstairs,’ said Wylie.

‘I here with you,’ said Miss Counihan.

‘Call the woman,’ said Neary. Sometimes he sang:

etc. Other times:

etc. Other times, other songs. But most times he did not sing at all.

‘She is at hand,’ said Wylie, ‘and has been for some little time, unless there is a real goat in the house as well.’

It was Sunday, October the 20th, Murphy’s night of duty had come. So all things limp together for the only possible.

L
ATE
that afternoon, after many fruitless hours in the chair, it would be just about the time Celia was telling her story, M.M.M. stood suddenly for music,
MUSIC
, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly. Murphy interpreted this in his favour, for he had seldom been in such need of encouragement.

But in the night of Skinner’s House, walking round and round at the foot of the cross among the shrouded instruments of recreation, having done one round and marking the
prescribed
pause of ten minutes before the next, he felt the gulf between him and them more strongly than at any time during his week of day duty. He felt it was very likely with them that craved to cross it as with them that dreaded to – they never did.

A round took ten minutes, all being well. If all was not well, if a patient had cut his throat, or required attention, then the extra time taken by the round was levied on the pause. For it was an inflexible rule of the M.M.M., laid down in terms so strong as to be almost abusive, that every patient, and not merely those on parchment (or on caution), should be visited at regular intervals of not more than twenty minutes throughout the night. If things were so bad that the round took ten minutes longer than it should, then there was no pause and all was in order. But if things were still worse and the round took eleven minutes longer than it should, and as less than no pause was unfortunately beyond the powers of even the smartest attendant, then the painful fact had simply to be faced once more, that man proposed, but God disposed, even in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat.

The incidence of this higher law might have been reduced by the introduction at night of an emergency runner. But this 
would have run the Mercyseat into close on a pound a week, supposing the mug could have been found.

A clean round, facetiously called a ‘virgin’, was simplicity itself. The nurse had merely to depress a switch before each door, flooding the cell with light of such ferocity that the eyes of the sleeping and waking opened and closed respectively, satisfy himself with a glance through the judas that the patient looked good for another twenty minutes, switch off the light, press the indicator and pass.

The indicator was most ingenious. The indicator recorded the visit, together with the hours, minutes and seconds at which it was paid, on a switchboard in Bom’s apartment. The indicator would have been still more ingenious if it had been activated by the light switch, or even by the judas shutter. For many and many were the visits recorded for Bom’s inspection, and never paid, by nurses who were tired or indolent or sensitive or fed up or malicious or behind time or unwilling to shatter a patient’s repose.

Bom was what is vulgarly called a sadist and encouraged what is vulgarly called sadism in his assistants. If during the day this energy could not be discharged with any great freedom even on those patients who submitted to it as part and parcel of the
therapeutic
voodoo, with still less freedom could it be discharged on those who regarded it as
hors d’œuvre
. These latter were reported to the R.M.S. as ‘uncooperative’, ‘not cooperating in the routine of the wards’ or, in extreme cases, ‘resistive’. They were liable to get hell at night.

Murphy’s first round had shown him what a mere phrase was Neary’s ‘Sleep and Insomnia, the Phidias and Scopas of Fatigue’. It might have held good in the dormitory of a young ladies’ academy, where quite possibly also it had been inspired, but it had no sense in the wards of the M.M.M. Here those that slept and those that did not were quite palpably by the same hand, that of some rather later artist whose work could by no means have come down to us, say the Pergamene Barlach. And in his efforts to distinguish between the two groups Murphy was 
reminded of a wild waning winter afternoon in Toulon before the
hôtel de ville
and Puget’s caryatids of Strength and Weariness, and the tattered sky blackening above his perplexity as to which was which.

Those that slept did so in the frozen attitudes of Herculaneum, as though sleep had pounced upon them like an act of God. And those that did not did not by the obvious grace of the same authority. The contortions of the resistive in particular seemed to Murphy not so much an entreaty to nature’s soft nurse as a recoil from her solicitations. The economy of care was better served, in the experience of the resistive, when they knit up the sleave by day.

By day he had not felt the gulf so painfully as he did now, walking round and round the wreck. By day there was Bom and other staff, there were the doctors and the visitors, to stimulate his sense of kindred with the patients. There were the patients themselves, circulating through the wards and in the gardens. He could mix with them, touch them, speak to them, watch them, imagine himself one of them. But in the night of Skinner’s there were none of these adminicles, no loathing to love from, no kick from the world that was not his, no illusion of caress from the world that might be. It was as though the microcosmopolitans had locked him out. No sound reached him from the adjacent female wards but the infinite variety of those made by the female wardees, a faint blurred mockery, from which however as the night wore on a number of leading motifs emerged. Ditto for the male wards below. The cackle of a nightingale would have been most welcome, to explode his spirit towards its nightingaleless night. But the season seemed over.

In short there was nothing but he, the unintelligible gulf and they. That was all. All.
ALL
.

It was therefore with a heavy heart that he set out on round two. The first cell to be revisited, that at the south-westernmost corner of the nave, contained Mr. Endon, voted by one and all the most biddable little gaga in the entire institution, his preoccupation with apnoea notwithstanding. Murphy switched 
on the thousand candles, shot back the judas shutter and looked in. A strange sight met his eye.

Mr. Endon, an impeccable and brilliant figurine in his scarlet gown, his crest a gush of vivid white against the black shag, squatted tailor-fashion on the head of his bed, holding his left foot in his right hand and in his left hand his right foot. The purple poulaines were on his feet and the rings were on his fingers. The light spurted off Mr. Endon north, south, east, west and in fifty-six other directions. The sheet stretched away before him, as smooth and taut as a groaning wife’s belly, and on it a game of chess was set up. The little blue and olive face, wearing an expression of winsome fiat, was up-turned to the judas.

Murphy resumed his round, gratified in no small measure. Mr. Endon had recognised the feel of his friend’s eye upon him and made his preparations accordingly. Friend’s eye? Say rather, Murphy’s eye. Mr. Endon had felt Murphy’s eye upon him. Mr. Endon would have been less than Mr. Endon if he had known what it was to have a friend; and Murphy more than Murphy if he had not hoped against his better judgment that his feeling for Mr. Endon was in some small degree reciprocated. Whereas the sad truth was, that while Mr. Endon for Murphy was no less than bliss, Murphy for Mr. Endon was no more than chess. Murphy’s eye? Say rather, the chessy eye. Mr. Endon had vibrated to the chessy eye upon him and made his preparations accordingly.

Murphy completed his round, an Irish virgin. (Finished on time a round was called a virgin; ahead of time, an Irish virgin.) The hypomanic it is true, in pad since morning with a big attack blowing up, had tried to come at his tormentor through the judas. This distressed Murphy, though he rather disliked the hypomanic. But it did not delay him. Quite the reverse.

He hastened back westward down the nave with his master key at the ready. He stopped short of the wreck, switched on Mr. Endon’s light and entered bodily into his cell. Mr. Endon was in the same position all but his head, which was now bowed, whether over the board or merely on his chest it was hard to say. 
Murphy sank down on his elbow on the foot of the bed and the game began.

Murphy’s functions were scarcely affected by this break with the tradition of night duty. All it meant was that he took his pauses with Mr. Endon instead of in the wreck. Every ten minutes he left the cell, pressed the indicator with heartfelt conviction and did a round. Every ten minutes and sometimes even sooner, for never in the history of the M.M.M. had there been such a run of virgins and Irish virgins as on this Murphy’s maiden night, he returned to the cell and resumed the game. Sometimes an entire pause would pass without any change having been made in the position; and at other times the board would be in an uproar, a torrent of moves.

The game, an Endon’s Affence, or
Zweispringerspott
, was as follows: