Rotting Hill (20 page)

    The doctor gone, the humane girl continued her ministrations while the rest of the staff were rather (for them) mysteriously aloof. She lifted the veil, too, on the hours during which he had been unconscious. She was much impressed by the excessive bleeding; dish after dish had to be emptied until the doctor was summoned. Eldred had also decorated the wall with some of it. His most serious escapade, however, was connected with the Matron. She and Nurse Tanner were interested spectators of the blood-bath when unexpectedly he began blowing, it seemed, like a sea beast—but blowing blood. He puffed blood all over the spectators. The Matron, dabbing herself with a towel, had beat a hasty retreat followed by Nurse Tanner, who since then had not put in an appearance. Eldred was gravely concerned as he listened to the report of this eyewitness of his bad behaviour, but the girl was discreetly amused. He, of course, could appreciate the comic stimulus to a young mind, but he did not feel certain what the Matron’s reactions would be. Were these people to see him as a boor who blew blood over those who were kind to him he would be deeply mortified. On this score his conscience was soon set at rest. About six o’clock the Matron came in, spotless and unruffled. She began at once to point out how necessary it was to bleed, in order to enable the septic content of the gum to be carried away. What she seemed mainly concerned to do was to white-wash her little doctor. Eldred smiled at her: for while
he
had been worrying a little at what her reactions might be,
she
had been preoccupied with what she felt must be
his
reactions, at the excessive haemorrhage.

    As she spoke of the necessity of much blood Dr. McLachlan appeared and on seeing his patient’s benign expression, he grew very excited and jocular. His wit and gallantry was side-stepped by the Matron as if she were ducking to avoid missiles. She plunged her eyes from one corner of the room to the other, refusing to meet his gallant glance or to give him smile for smile. He attempted to intercept her plunging gaze, piqued at her unresponsiveness; but she flung her head bodily over in the opposite direction, and he quietened down after that. And soon they both departed.

    Eldred found that he was unable to stand. The bed had to be made with him in it, by a couple of dwarfish hissing gnomes. The day’s goings and comings were succeeded by Sister Bridget and relative peace. As he lay there and was able to look back upon what had occurred in the theatre without distraction, he perceived how far from the normal the proceedings had been. They partook unmistakably of the nature of a rite. A blood-sacrifice had been enacted: and it must always be in that spirit that the theatre was used, even if it was only an appendix that was involved. Their theatre was the obsessive emotional centre round which the existence of these secluded women revolved. The peculiar interest he seemed to awaken in the nuns on the morning of the operation, which at the time he was aware of but could not understand, was explained in the light of this analysis. It was
his
blood that was going to be shed that day, it was he that was about to have an agony.

    Then there seemed to be a theory governing the actions of everybody in this institution that a patient invariably was in a state of the liveliest terror during the hours immediately preceding his operation, however insignificant that might be, and even that he was apt to become dangerous. Sister Giles’s attitude was explained in some degree by these circumstances. The
danger,
as it was felt, inhering in the terrified victim accounted for the unnecessary potency of the drug administered as a
quietener.
Actually it had more the effect of knockout drops. Lastly there was the mobilization of all the available man-power to hold down and if necessary to restrain the victim about to be sacrificed. Eldred enquired of the friendly girl (one of a family of converts from the Putney-Wimbledon district) whether patients were always held down in the theatre or whether he had impressed them as a singularly violent type of man. Her answer was that patients on the operating table often kicked and struck out. Once a Sister had been injured by a violent blow in the stomach.

    Of course all this, far from prejudicing Eldred against the Home, merely confirmed him in the view that he was
really
in a medieval
pocket,
as it were preserved by means of disciplines and incantations. These good women had evolved a biological mechanism deeply Christian, centering in a sacrifice and an agony. Then death noisily abounded beneath their roof. Eldred discovered that several of the rooms contained relatively poor people, in which respect it differed from Protestant nursing-homes, run strictly for profit. In fact these poor creatures had crawled there to die. It was not easy in the utilitarian England of 1950 to find a place to die in, outside of the poor house, which is the terror of the destitute old. They all believe that the infirm are given a mercy-killing there. Unless you are rich, it is highly inconvenient to die where you live. But death is the element in which these women of course had gone to dwell. They have gone to live next door to death, away from the world which pretends there is no death or which forgets it. They live in saintly proximity to the indestructible regions into which death admits the penitent and impenitent. Their minds steadfastly fixed away from the temporal, at night they lay themselves down in a grave. Souls are always flying past their ears into blessedness or damnation. So, dedicated to the care of the sick, the nuns had no objection to the moribund. On the contrary. Having died to the sensual life themselves, a person in the act of abandoning it, involuntarily, became akin to them; though it was a constant source of astonishment to them with what noisy reluctance their dying patients took the final step and died.

    That morning at dawn an approaching bell tinkled in the corridor and a hurrying tread came to a stop at the door of the neighbouring room. Then through the thin partition came the flat rapid expressionless recitation of prayers for the dying. There was a silence and afterwards the bell hastened away. Considerably later a man’s voice was heard in impassioned supplication, a supplication as old as the catacombs, modulated in such a way as to make it evident it was a text that was being said, not a man speaking. How splendidly that was read! thought Eldred. There was soon a dead silence. The groaning had diminished and at length had stopped. The priest prayed. Then suddenly breaking the silence, his voice was heard laughing heartily, a rather startling sound in the early morning. He was talking with great gusto. Eldred supposed Sister Bridget must be there now.

    This patient died three days later, Eldred assisting through the partition, at the rite of extreme unction. He stared at the ceiling as there were sounds that must be the confession. Almost simultaneously, through the partition behind the head of his bed a poor woman violently entered upon the last stage of some painful disease. He was told nothing could be done for her, and several times she embarrassed Dr. McLachlan by her yells. It was her habit to scream with pain for a while, but otherwise she was relatively quiet. Eldred assumed they gave her a drug, she was at peace for such long intervals.

    As Eldred was not a strong man it was some days before he could even take a few steps. But Dr. McLachlan was visibly elated. He took all the credit for Eldred’s surviving his bad doctoring.

    On his side the patient was well pleased with his physician. For had he not introduced him to a community of expert recluses, who daily demonstrated for him an immemorial technique, enabling you to give the impression that you are a mile away, when in fact only separated by a yard or so from another person. Eldred began to practise under the bedclothes, twirling his thumbs while he chatted with Nurse Tanner, as an aid to self-abstraction.

    One evening patient and doctor, as usual, engaged in a little frivolous speculation: Eldred imparted, in the first place, how vastly he esteemed the nuns and the good work for which they were responsible. He went on:

    “When these execrable monopolists, the socialists, have abolished by taxation all the other clinics and nursing-homes outside the state-hospital system, the Catholic clinics will still be there. They will be the last refuge of free medicine. One will still be able to be ill like a gentleman, thanks to them.”

    “There is the Masonic Hospital,” McLachlan observed. “That is outside the National Health Service too.”

    “Is it indeed?” Eldred looked up quickly. “How did they manage that?”

    “Some influential Freemasons went to see the Health Minister, who quite likes
influential
vermin! It is a wonderfully well-appointed hospital—the best in England in fact—and particularly difficult to get into.”

    “For non-Masons.”

    “No, for Masons!” bleakly the little doctor laughed. “Patients of mine who are Masons have been unable to get in, though I tried very hard for them. Were they indignant!”

    “Ah!” Eldred seemed to be interested.

    “Then I believe—I am not sure about this though—that the Labour Hospital has been left outside the National Health Service.”

    “What is that? I suppose a hospital for members of the Labour Party.”

    “I do not know.”

    “In the Welfare State there must be privilege!” By a hairsbreadth the patient escaped a belly-jeer.

    The Matron entered.

    “How are you tonight, Dr. Eldred?” she enquired.

    “Feeling much better,” he told her. “Much better. Oh, Sister, there was something I had to say. I think you should all make a novena to your patron saint for me.”

    As he was speaking her expression changed in no way, but before he had finished she had turned away and quickly left the room.

    “I fear I offended her,” Eldred observed.

    “No. Evidently what you said reminded her of something. She is very forgetful.”

    “She misunderstood me, I think,” Eldred explained. “What I was about to say was this: I propose to write a short history of the order to which she belongs. That was why, I meant, they should make a novena for me, or some other suitable devotion. For I shall need all their prayers.”

    “Oh, I see,” McLachlan laughed distantly. He went over gravely and sought information of the clockwork in the patient’s wrist, taking out of his waistcoat pocket a massive professional man’s gold watch. Eldred, smiling, lay quite still. This was always McLachlan’s procedure when his patient said anything he did not like. And he had not liked the request for the novena any more than had the Matron.

    For the rest, as Eldred lay there, day after day, during the maddening hospital routine of cleaning, nourishing, evacuating, and he steadily refused to look at a book or much more a newspaper, he immersed himself in a luxurious barrenness. Was he not buried alive? He was buried deeper, hour by hour, by these Irish dwarfs, hissing as they worked. Would he ever be so happy in any other mode of existence? Since the days when first his ambition began to impose its idiot disciplines, he had known no relief.
Here
he had found it. The hissing dwarf that solemnly scrubbed his face, and the grinning one that tickled his feet, were all the company he ever wanted.

    Often he spoke to the friendly girl of her conversion, and that of her parents. He wished to peer into her mind and discover how conversion affected the thinking of the Movie-bred twentieth-century young: an injection of the medieval into one of Hollywood’s spiritual brood. But it was the nuns who were of course his principal study, from the immovable Matron to the gay but equally evasive Sister Bridget. “Ah, God bless ye!” she would say with fervour after he had said he would send her a gold crucifix he had seen in one of Rotting Hill’s antique shops. But she was not to be bribed into departing from edification of Irish gaiety. There was no other mode.

    His first opportunity of trying out the techniques he was acquiring occurred about seven days after the haemorrhage. Still decidedly unsteady (and, according to his habit, exploiting his infirmity) he was dragging himself back from the bathroom, most theatrically the Invalid. A familiar figure suddenly appeared, and he heard himself greeted in a vaguely familiar voice, in tones of deep surprise.

    “Dr. Eldred! A nursing-home is the last place I should have expected to find you, sir. Nothing serious I hope?”

    The reporter whose face he had last seen, and fled from, a week ago in Rotting Gardens stood blocking the corridor. What was
he
doing here, the rat? Running
someone
to earth. His was the least welcome of visages: Eldred put on his usual mask for reporters; namely, suggesting that the stench of an exposed cesspool had suddenly reached his arching nostrils and curled lip, but that stoically he was smiling it off.

    “What are you doing here?” he enquired of the reporter, rather in the manner of Sister Giles.

    “Well, Dr. Eldred, that was precisely what I asked you just now?”

    “I am just resting,” he growled, the old manner returning. “I am just resting here for a short while. Yes, just
resting.
I was absolutely worn out, you know.” And he squinted up at the other sideways, his head lolling forward.

    The reporter expressed deep sympathy and confided that sometimes he “felt rotten” himself.

    “Yes, you feel
rotten,
” Eldred said heavily, “because of the
rottenness
of your life. But my life is rotten too.”

    The reporter expressed hilarious scepticism.

    “No,” Eldred heavily insisted, “rotten!” But he had become more lumbering and Johnsonian every moment. Though his frame lacked flesh, he
felt
bulky in his voluminous dressing-gown, so had started rolling from side to side as Boswell described his Master as prone to do. Alas, affecting to be a bigger man than he was, at least in girth, he was overtaken by the weakness ensuing from his loss of blood: at the end of a long roll to larboard he almost fell over. The wall of the corridor saved him but he fell heavily against it. He shook off the reporter’s helping hand.