Rotting Hill (18 page)

    When they reached the top of the stairs there was a brief blank corridor. The corridor was L-shaped, they turned at right-angles and were in a gloomy hall and saw a man’s back bent over a table. He was absorbed in something which turned out to be a temperature chart.

    A nurse carrying a tray came out of an open doorway. She said: “Are you Dr. Eldred?” and the man doubled up over the chart abruptly straightened himself, and it was Dr. McLachlan smiling a frosty welcome. “Ah, I did not hear you,” he said. “How curious.” “Not really,” said Eldred. “Miss Cosway and I are not a clamorous pair.” They all laughed genteelly. “Well, let us come to your room, Dr. Eldred. It is just here.” They moved down a fairly long windowless corridor. One door was open, from it came an authentically sepulchral groan, which increased Eldred’s respect for the home (it might be small but it groaned like a hospital), whereas it caused Dr. McLachlan to cough censoriously while stepping up their progress.

    Eldred’s room, however, was the next and the doctor led the way in jauntily, rigid but jocular. “Admittedly small but it is quite pleasant I think,” he remarked as he looked around. Eldred looked around as well. “A bright box for a toothless historian to lie in,” was his view. “And a hot box, too.” “Ah, but you asked for heat,” the doctor reminded. “I asked for heat”—in his usual way Eldred, for answer provided a deep significant echo—the same words his interlocutor had used, but loaded with a supposed meaning of almost limitless profundity. Half of Eldred’s conversation was made up of such reverberating echoes.

    “I will get into bed,” the patient abruptly announced. Miss Cosway moved towards the door quickly, casting an anxious backward glance over her shoulder.

    “Yes, do so,” agreed the doctor. “I will remain with Miss Cosway where you found me just now,” and Eldred was left alone. Evidently no room for visitors, he thought. You have to stand around in the space between the lavatory and kitchen and study the charts, or else leave the premises. Contact with the profane is reduced to a clinical minimum. He smiled in the midst of his shirt, which he was pulling over his head. As he stood in his undergarments the door opened and a nun of severe aspect entered. She looked at him absent-mindedly, turned loiteringly as if attempting to remember something, and left. Eldred gave a belly-jeer with much real gusto. “Am I of glass?” he asked the air. “Do people see through me—but do I make them remember something they had forgotten? Am I a transparent remembrancer?”

    Once in bed Eldred pressed the dangling bell-button and secured the return of his doctor and secretary. It was his wish to get rid of them quickly and to be alone with the nursing-home; away from everything with a lot of nuns—bathing in their remoteness from the vile and worthless world of the malignant commonplace, of vociferous nonentity, and to stop there until he had learned the secret of their apartness.

    After apologizing for the absence of the Matron, Dr. McLachlan offered to drive Miss Cosway back to Rotting Gardens. To a few last anxious, indeed desperate, appeals from his secretary, Eldred answered: “Tell them I am dead.”

    Miss Cosway accorded to this the hysterical laugh indicated. Recovered from the spasm she said: “I have sent the telegrams to New College and to Wilfred Bull. There was nothing tonight…”

    “Nothing tonight!” Eldred echoed angrily, glancing at his doctor.

    Apprehensively Miss Cosway glanced at the doctor, too, slightly flushing. “Well, you know what I mean, nothing really
important,
nothing that cannot be arranged. But
tomorrow
…”

    “Ah, tomorrow!” echoed Eldred significantly.

    “Jennifer Robinson was coming to tea, and she will be so dreadfully angry.”

    “She does allow her temper a bit too much rope. And she grows arrogant.”

    “Yes. She bullies me when I say you are engaged. She doesn’t think you are! It’s quite absurd.”

    “Absurd!” Eldred frowned.

    “I know,” said Miss Cosway, “but you know what she is! She will go away and describe you somewhere, in a gossip item, as ‘the greatest historian since Froude’!”

    Eldred was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, under the sceptical gaze of his doctor. No engagement tonight!—and merely a publicity interview with a gossip-writer tomorrow! “Am I not supposed to be dining with Sir Christopher Smith tomorrow?” he demanded.

    “No, Dr. Eldred. That is next month.”

    “Ah, next month. Next month it is!” growled Eldred, giving his secretary a rather nasty look.

    “But what can I do about the address you had agreed to give on Monday? The Charterhouse Literary Society.” She was wringing her hands over this unpaid talk to an obscure group. “And there is that Canadian historian.”

    “Canadian historian?”

    “Yes. The one you said had cribbed your last book. His name is Dr. Burnaby Harry. I think you said he had a Chair in the Arctic Circle.”

    Eldred stared fixedly at Miss Cosway, attempting to mesmerize her into silence. “Please do not allow these problems to worry you,” he said, spectacularly relaxing. “Tell everybody—and I mean
everybody,
to go to hell.”

    Dr. McLachlan beamed frostily upon her. “Excellent advice!” richly and throatily he told her. He then, with a frigid pinch of jauntiness and Scottish gallantry, carried her off, protesting.

    In describing Paul Eldred it is very easy to make him seem a clown and nothing else, and this even without succumbing to the temptation to select what may possibly entertain. His mind was at times blotted out by his frantic vanity, but of course a mind was there. The inferiority feeling of a provincial, it was believed by the wisest of his friends, had rotted his personality and even eroded his intelligence. Jones, his most sceptical friend, had had an unpleasant experience on two occasions. It was not the waspish ferocity of the little feverish ego that darted out on him that surprised him. The subterranean existence of such a spiteful animal he had been dimly aware of. What surprised him was that Eldred no longer troubled to check it, but allowed it to have its way and dart out and bite people. Of course what provoked these sorties had been connected with old Paul’s
work.
Jones had ventured a criticism of something. But he found that what had begun as a young man’s resolve to run himself, in the Intellectual Stakes—and quite good-humouredly while youthful still—as a “great” something or other, had developed, as time went on, into a pathological self-esteem. It is true, “greatness” had come: which no one was better qualified than what Paul once had been to evaluate. But
that
Paul was no longer there. “Greatness” corrupts. From that time, after the
second
of these disagreeable episodes, Jones refrained from all reference to the
works
of his old friend. But he still respected a certain flickering integrity, and loved the image of his youthful companion which haunted this celebrated ruin.

    Almost regenerated in his present isolation, Eldred even came to look ten years younger. Having climbed out of that Cigar Store Indian, the Great Dr. Eldred, having found, by accident, a place where it was impossible to be that anyhow, he lay in his bed an
undressed
personality, as it were. The patient-in-bed situation helped. He never had felt so free since he was a schoolboy. He embraced that anonymity he had always dreaded.

    The nurse he had already seen entered.

    “Good afternoon. I am Nurse Tanner. Here is some lunch.”

    A hard-boiled egg, a tea-cup full of tapioca, and a thin grey slice of bread was placed upon the glass table with long chromium-plated legs which straddled the bed. The fare of the anchorite! He beamed quietly on the savage repast. Nurse Tanner interpreted this as sarcasm.

    He ate the egg and was looking at the tapioca when a nun entered with her mouth open, holding a hypodermic syringe. It was obvious she was toothless: her eye-sockets were empty, in the hollows lived her eyes.

    “I am Sister Giles,” she told him, aloofly but aggressively.

    “And I am Paul Eldred,” said he.

    The nun was in a white conventual uniform, the much-pleated skirt needing a dozen petticoats for it to balloon around the nether limbs—or how else could it be so pneumatically expansive and beautifully circular? (This applied to all the massive myriad-pleated skirts in which the nuns discouraged the idea that nuns have legs.) Sister Giles was the nun who had intruded and gazed through his underwear at the window beyond: and for her he was still obviously vitreous.

    Eldred smiled sweetly, Sister Giles’s blank expression was unchanged.

    “Please lie flat on your tummy,” she said.

    Eldred dutifully heeled himself over, pulled down his pyjamas and presented a buttock to Sister Giles, enquiring gently and even a little archly: “Is that all right?”

    “No,” said the nun gazing away, “flat on your face please. It’s no use if you don’t, you know.”

    “I see. That makes it clear at once,” said he understandingly. “The muscles have to be relaxed, haven’t they.”

    Sister Giles rubbed a spot on the buttock with wet cotton-wool.

    “She’s a shy old girl,” he thought. “It is natural. I should be frightfully embarrassed if I were an old monk and had to do this to a lot of worldly matrons.” To her he said gaily over his shoulder: “Novocaine, I can smell it.”

    She jabbed in the needle.

    “Thank you,” he said. When she had gone Eldred ate the tapioca. Afterwards he felt a little sick. Nurse Tanner entered, collected the lunch-tray, and suggested a little sleep. She was a stream-lined hospital nurse for whom patients were a species distinct from nurses. She saw him close his eyes with satisfaction and left the room giving him an
up
stroke in her mental chart. Sleep was just sealing his eyes but the door opened and a nun came in and moved up to the side of the bed. “How do you feel, Dr. Eldred? I am the Matron. Are you comfortable?” She apologized for appearing on the scene so late. As she spoke her hands were interlocked in front, but the two thumbs circled rapidly around each other. All of their faces appeared at the end of a tunnel of white lawn and looked strangely small. This miniature face looked at him along its white tunnel with a painfully placid aloofness while she talked, her thumbs revolving as though a small propeller, perhaps to sustain the smooth flight of her mind in the profane dimension, perhaps to preserve an equilibrium naturally threatened in commerce with the world, which must be an artifice demanding effort. She was a very sensitive educated woman. Undoubtedly it was an effort for her to be normal yet abnormal, to be worldly at the end of a white tunnel, to reintegrate her pre-sanctified personality for the occasion; she moved back into it with stiffness and distaste. Again, the
quantity
of chat each patient might receive was rigidly rationed. After she had expended, say, a hundred words for a maximum, the interview would not be broken off but would fade out. If the patient said anything further she would not answer as if she had not heard it. She would wheel, in her bulbous voluted skirt of dark blue, like a clockwork figure, and move quickly out of the room. The words were well chosen and sensible, perhaps thanks to the whirling of the thumbs.

    After the Matron’s departure Eldred turned over and thought again of sleep. His eyes were rolling up, his limbs relaxing, his blood was leaving the surface vessels and his mental images were beginning to behave drunkenly when someone entered. It was one of the many stunted female gossoons, Irish nationals, attached to the nurses. Muttering something she thrust her hand violently into the foot of the bed. After a lunge or two she seized the hot water-bottle on which his feet were resting and drew it out of the bed. Next she pushed in a hotter bottle. This taciturn intruder having shuffled out he took up a book and read for a few minutes. The door opened and a startled Irish face appeared. “You rang, sor?” panted this girl. Very sweetly smiling Eldred gently shook his head, adding a musical “No”. “You did not ring!” the girl cried frantically and charged out. Five minutes later the book began to slump down and his eyes to close when Nurse Tanner entered briskly. She put down a slip of paper on the bed-table. “Your signature is required,” she said with her efficient smile. “Ah, yes,” said he, picking up the paper drowsily. “Yes, I think you may administer any anaesthetic you like. Ah yes, and my nearest relative. You want to know that of course.” He signed the printed form, and returned it to the nurse as though she were an autograph-hunter. “You should try and get a little sleep now,” said Nurse Tanner, giving his pillow a push. “A capital notion,” said he with a smile that was a shadowy reminder of his old sardonic self. A most appalling groan, followed by a cry of anguish, came from the neighbouring room. “That woman sounds rather ill,” he observed. “Yes,” said Nurse Tanner as if he had broken some regulation. “She is very ill. She will probably die.” There was a cry from the other side of the thin partition—“Merciful God!” came the distracted voice. The nurse, of a neat dark prettyness, with very dark brown curls, looked very faintly annoyed and carried her neat little body away, self-righteously erect, as if all the good were healthy like herself. Eldred felt that this was much too real a nurse. She was the only discordant note.

    He now knew that however often Nurse Tanner recommended a little sleep, that sleep was out of the question. Up till eight o’clock, when the night staff came on, someone or other was always doing something in his room. The Matron moved in once more, looked at him distantly but tolerantly, asked when his teeth were to be extracted and did he sleep well, and removed herself silently. Tea at four and dining at six were the big events: but a considerable time was taken up in making the bed. He went to sit in the armchair from which he watched the two diminutive Irish helps on opposite sides of the bed swinging the bedclothes and pyramiding the pillows. He became conscious of an incessant hissing sound for which at first he supposed the pipes were responsible. But it was the two girls hissing at one another across the bed. He could not have sworn it was this, for their mouths did not move nor did their expression change and whatever they were doing—if one of them stooped down, for instance, to pick something up—the noise continued. But when they left the noise ceased. They were evidently able to converse with one another almost inaudibly.