Rotting Hill (19 page)

    Finally, before the night session, Dr. McLachlan showed up, as stiff and formal as a Prussian Geheimrat, though sitting on the edge of his bed in a frosty familiarity. Eldred reflected how he fitted into the Home. After all, the Matron and he belonged to the same ethos. On his side, the doctor consulted with himself. He had expected a lofty exasperation on the great man’s part with everything, just because it was not the London Clinic. To his surprise he heard criticism of nothing. He had never seen his patient so calm—yes and so happy. He went away pondering this paradox. And just before he left Eldred gave him a slip of paper, on which he had written a message for Miss Cosway, to the effect that for the remainder of his stay he did not wish her to visit him or communicate with him in any way. He wished to be completely alone. This message the doctor was enjoined to deliver by telephone to ROT 5959 the first thing in the morning.

    One thing that would not be apt to enter into the doctor’s analysis was the fact of the excessive acuity of Eldred’s time sense. Could he have been carried back in a time machine to the England of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, he would not—as did Erasmus on a first visit—have been disgusted with filthy rush floors, never renewed, but fresh rushes put down on top of the old. The time-sense would have restrained him from finding fault with the backward islanders. His attitude towards the Catholic Home where he found himself was that, to the best of its ability, it was in the Middle Ages. (Which does not mean, it was otherwise than clean and comfortable.) Of course, as to Eldred’s
other
feelings his doctor could not have divined what
they
might be. He simply regarded his patient’s attitude as fortunate, but perversely incomprehensible.

    Dr. McLachlan before going checked on the pulse, pulled down his lower eyelid, raised his upper eyelid, and informed himself as to the stool. Lastly he asked him if he had managed to get some sleep. Eldred smiled and shook his head.

    “I think Sister Bridget, that is the night Sister, had better give you something.”

    “Perhaps it would be as well,” the patient agreed. For if the night staff had anything like the vitality of the day staff he would certainly, he reasoned, require a sleeping draught.

    The doctor looked at him sharply. This new docility and quietistic temper (if it was not a pose) began to worry him. He coughed—as if to say
Achtung!

    “I expect you are terribly bored, Dr. Eldred,” he observed, as one man of the world to another.

    “Not at all.”

    The doctor brushed the negative lightly aside.

    “Of course you must be. A man like you, always surrounded by people…”

    He got no further, for this galvanized Eldred into automatic action. “Surrounded by people!” he protested, with gently raised eyebrows. No man, alas, is a bona fide recluse to his doctor.

    “Well, you
would
be, of course, that is what I mean, if you did not employ two secretaries to hold them at arm’s length. I know how many admirers you have, Dr. Eldred. Some of them are my patients. Loaded with engagements as you are, it must be a strange experience to step out of it all, suddenly like this. To be in so uncompromisingly—er—insulated a nursing institution as this is too.”

    “A blissfully strange experience,” Eldred told his dubiously gazing medical adviser, who then approached and gravely checked once more the blood’s faint thump in the wrist. Next morning, he explained, O’Toole the dentist and Dr. Tomlin the anaesthetist, and he himself, would gather well before one o’clock in the operating theatre. He and Eldred would not
meet,
properly speaking, until later, after the mass-extraction: and at length he left with a throaty
Good night.

    It was 8 p.m. Sister Bridget arrived, hypodermic syringe in hand. There was a smile which was a bitter-sweet rictus forever upon her still lovely waxen face. Half heeling over Eldred presented his bared buttock to the nun. “Is that far enough over, Sister, or shall I flatten out?” he enquired. “Ach, no!” she genially dismissed the exactions of the day-sister martinet. “That’s arl that is necessary of course it is.” Hearing the accents of Cork or Clare (John Bull’s Other Island English) he responded with a friendly smile. “Ah,” he thought, “Irish, so with a more elastic and graceful puritanism. No
Get on your tummy stuff
with her!” But the injection hurt quite a lot—far more than with the day-nun. But Sister Bridget was so kind and had so much beauty that he did not mind if her ministrations caused pain. His temperature came next, and after that she gave him a powder which took effect with great dispatch. It was not until five in the morning that he awoke, and lay listening apparently to a dromedary charging up and down the uncarpeted boards of the corridor. It was Sister Bridget with her long legs, in her ungainly shoes, rushing to and fro in response to the summonses of the distracted patients. The groans, and the agonized protests against the fierce pain, were clearer than ever at this early hour. He lay wondering what this poor woman could have done to be racked in that way. The partition was so thin he could hear her clutching at the bedclothes and grinding her teeth, calling on God in his mercy to spare her these agonies.

    Soon afterwards he had another penicillin injection and Sister Bridget’s tribe of little snub-nosed helpers proved to be quite as agile and officious as Nurse Tanner’s. The lowest in rank of the personnel, the floor-mopper, was also the newspaper girl. Eldred enjoined her
under no circumstances
to bring a newspaper into the room. She gave him a kind of frightened leer for answer. Then at eight came breakfast, and from then up to noon some gnome or other, or a nun or a nurse, was weaving in and out of the room.

    There was one thing which especially attracted his attention during these four hours. The Matron and Sister Giles both came in twice. Sister Giles as usual wandered in casually as though she had forgotten something and had come in there in order to remember it. But she drifted up to the bed and gazed into his face. He was even able to see that her eyes were blue. This proceeding almost startled him. He said to himself that her face was like that of one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse in a German church. The Matron, on both occasions, seemed to be peering at him very inquisitively. It would be all right, she said—though he did not know exactly what she meant. “Am I pale?” he asked smiling. Her answer was that the Sister would give him something at twelve o’clock. That was always done, she said: over significantly he thought. He considered both these women a little odd.

    At noon Sister Giles strayed purposefully in, and ordered him negligently to go to the operating theatre. “For dope?” he asked, succinctly, like herself. She nodded. “Not
here?
”—he expressed his surprise. “No,” she said and left the room. (Ah well, he thought, they are wise to put her on in the daytime. I should hate to have her around at night.) He put on his dressing-gown and went out. Hundreds of Hibernian gnomes were charging up and down the corridor, with food, flowers, bedpans, and hot water-bottles. After walking through the territory of two other nurses he came to a stairway. This was to the rear of the building. At the foot was a much broader corridor. A few yards and it terminated in an obviously important and sinister door. There was no stink of ether, which usually announces the proximity of the theatre. But he pushed the door and it was an unmistakable theatre. There was the stage, like a glorified ironing-board, on which a recumbent performer went through his limp and speechless part, except for an imprecation or a dark mutter escaping the drugged body like speech from a corpse (though in this strangest of theatres there are some who consider the Star to be the so-called Man in White). There hung the hooded lamp above the stage to illuminate the performance, with its cold false daylight, often the last light the entranced actor is to see on this earth. This most tragic of all actors is carried in and out of the theatre, if the play is a tragedy, Eldred thought, and not a comedy like his.

    The room was lofty, a large north-lighted cube, filled with the clinical gadgets of surgery. Probably it had been a garden-studio. Once the bearded painter had here attacked his canvas, his fist bristling with brushes: and here a fair Victorian, corsetted like a swollen wasp, giving a little precious gasp of alarm had been overcome by faintness, collapsing like a monstrous toy upon the painter’s throne. The good historian almost smelled the sal volatile or eau de Cologne all Victorian painters would have in readiness, with, as a last resort, scissors to snip the murderous “stays”.

    Sister Giles, as he entered, was stolidly stationed beside the operating table. She at once began propelling it towards the window. She placed it exactly under the window and then turned in his direction, her eyes directed towards the door in the middle distance. “Where,” he asked, looking around for a chair, “shall I sit?” She gave the operating table two slaps. “Get up on this,” she instructed him with impeccable boredom. He walked over, and smiling almost meltingly at the venerable religious dragon, objected “Up there, Sister?” “Yes.” “But I shall roll off.” The nun however administered two absent-minded slaps to the operating table. “You must do as the doctor says,” she told him, in a flat impatient voice; “you have to lie down here.” She tapped to show where and stood looking away. It was not at all easy to mount this high and narrow resting place: once he had done so and stretched himself out, it was intolerably hard, for it was impossible to adjust the body to the hardness without tumbling off. “You must lie on your back.” The old nun was dully peremptory. He smiled. Evidently she did not know who he was. He wished she did, but wriggled upon his back, his rigid body violently protesting. The voice of cold command sounded again. “Roll up your sleeve.” (Ridiculous and incredible, thought he, that Dr. Paul Eldred should find himself cut off from the world, alone in this obscure operating theatre, obeying, as if he were a taxi-driver, this rough old nun.) He rolled the sleeve up and she dug a needle into the arm.

    A beautiful tropical drowsiness immediately began to pour into his brain and invade his limbs, the warmth of a potent obliteration. Ah, the boon of anaesthesia! The board was no longer hard, he was quite indifferent as to whether he fell off or not, death itself would be merely the infinity of his sweet anaesthesia, the putting to sleep of the will. And the nun was a good old fairy nun. All the same, even at that moment, he realized it was far too strong a dose he had been given. The last thing he saw before his head lolled over—and what will was left to him was a will to sleep, there was no resistance—was the Sister pushing a large white screen towards him, such as they screen the dead with in a hospital ward. It grew larger—whiter. He thought “Good old cross-patch!” and that was all he knew for the best part of an hour.

    A very imperfectly functioning consciousness returned to him, numbed and devoid of more feeling than a man would have about a cricket match if he was not interested in cricket, merely regarding it as a handful of white figures slowly changing position on a green field. A cocktail party might have been going on the other side of the screen. The theatre seemed full. Though it was true their hilarity was muted, there was polite mirth. But the atmosphere was electric too. The people the other side of the screen were excited. He felt like the Star actor out of sight of the expectant audience: or the Christian martyr in the echoing pens beneath the amphitheatre. Violently, as it seemed, two men pulled the screen aside, and he began rolling out into the room. He found himself beneath the closely impending hooded circle of the lamp.

    He hardly looked at all the people. Dr. McLachlan came up and whispered in his ear. “You feel quite comfortable?” “Perfectly,” he answered. “Why all the concourse, doctor? What an audience I have got.” McLachlan disregarded this. Eldred was aware of men in white, with white masked faces. One was doubtless the O’Toole, concealing his forceps behind his back; and even McLachlan had been in white. A red-faced man like a doctor, he noticed, was lying across his legs for some reason, as if to get a good look at him. He stared fixedly. Eldred’s head, it seemed, was hemmed in with people but he could only see their stomachs. Two men grasped his left arm. They had rolled up the sleeve and held his arm stiffly out from his side. Why on earth were all these people milling around him? he wondered. It was like being Gulliver, intoxicated perhaps, only mildly curious regarding the antics of his captors. Or images of the Inquisition visited him perforce. The Catholics had never liked his histories, they were all on the Index, it might be that he was about to be ementulated, or blinded. The nuns he saw betrayed this image for they ought to have been monks. Or was it a
woman’s Inquisition?
The needlessly brutal hands of the two kneeling house-serfs tightened upon his arm, he felt the plunging of a needle. The world stopped where it was for a second or two and then clicked out, like turning off an electric light.

    When he awakened he was in bed and a pleasant girl stood over him, one of the army of nurses’ mutes, but this one had a tongue and a beautifully expressive face.

    “Ah,” he said thickly, “the show is over.”

    She gave him a mug and told him it was to spit the blood in. Hours had passed since the extractions, he learned from the girl. But he still was stupefied. McLachlan hastily entered, his face flushed, no smile. He came over and warned Eldred he had bled too much as if it were his fault. “You must not touch your gums. The bleeding must not go on.” He asked to see his gums. These seemed to give him unexpected pleasure. “Doctors are always surprised if they have not seriously injured you,” was one of Jones’s sayings. But McLachlan’s comment was, “O’Toole has made a good job of it.” It seemed indeed that he had: apparently it was Dr. McLachlan who had been at fault. Since the events in the theatre Eldred had had, in his doctor’s absence, what almost amounted to a dangerous haemorrhage.