The Centre of the Green (3 page)

Charles’ head felt strange. Now he must pull himself together. He must wash up. He must make himself a cup of tea, and heat a tin of beans or something. He must decide what to do this evening. “I won’t go to the
pictures
anyway,” he said aloud, listened, realized that he was talking to himself, and added in bravado, “First sign of madness”. He switched on the radio. “Won’t go for a walk either,” he said. Not down Holland Park Avenue to Shepherd’s Bush and back. Not along the Bayswater Road and into Kensington Gardens, past the rows of men in macintoshes sitting vacantly on wooden benches. Not down Kensington Church Street, staring into the windows of antique shops, along Kensington High Street, and back through Holland Park. (Once, as he stood outside an antique shop, a passing stranger had stopped, pointed to the silver collar on a decanter, and said, “My friend used to wear one of those as a
bracelet
.”) “Won’t go to the local,” Charles said, “Won’t read a book”. The radio burped, and an announcer began to read the nine o’clock news. Charles switched it off. “So much for you,” he said. Then he said, “Want to go to sleep. Want to go to sleep, and never wake up,” and he remembered what it was he had planned to do this evening.

Of course it was ridiculous. Of course he wouldn’t do it. Anyway, he didn’t know what would happen. It wasn’t like the gas. He had heard that if you tried to gas yourself, the carbon dioxide paralyzed your motor
reactions
before you yourself became unconscious, so that you
could lie there wanting desperately to turn it off or open a window or something, but unable to do anything about it. Charles wouldn’t care for that. Pills were the thing, although of course one didn’t know what effect
these
pills would have.

Charles suffered from a mild hay fever during May and June. There were white pills to take by day, pink pills before going to bed at night. The pink pills made him feel drowsy. Therefore, he thought, they were only to make him sleep. Once he had taken two instead of the one prescribed, and had woken up next morning feeling blurry. What could be in them then but a barbiturate? If he were to take more than two—if he were to take the lot…. He fetched the pills from the drawer of his
bedside
table, opened the little round box, and tipped them into the palm of his hand. There were eleven. If he wanted to, he could take eleven.

There they were, pink against the pinky brown of his palm. They looked like toys, and seemed to have no weight. He would not take them all. There was no
question
of that. Thinking about a thing and doing it were two very different matters. But if he were to take—just two, say—it would kill the evening and the night, and nobody could object to that. To kill the evening—not to be bored, not to be by himself, not to be conscious, not to be alive——No, that was false reasoning; not to be alive
for a while
, but to wake up later to a new day, the
possibility
of some new happening, the possibility of
discovering
, of just simply knowing what on earth was the point of it all, and why people bothered. He took one of the pills and then another, washing them down with tonic water. Then temptation came. It came as curiosity. Temptation—nothing to do with the lusts of the flesh, just wanting to know, wanting to know what would happen it you took a bite out of that bloody apple, if you
swallowed another pill. He put another of the pills on his tongue, and cradled it there on the tip. Then he bit into it. It tasted rather nasty; no wonder they covered them with pink stuff. He drank some more tonic, and took a fourth pill. This was ridiculous. Dangerous. Furtive—a kind of self-abuse in a darkened room. Anyway, the damage was done. After four pills, he’d be very ill
indeed
, and never able to explain it away. No explanations. Suddenly he crammed all the last seven pills into his mouth at once, swallowing them with difficulty, and
feeling
each one as a separate bump in his gullet. Then he took his coat and shoes off, lay down on the bed, and fell almost instantly asleep. When he awoke, he was in hospital.

*

The long wards were set off at right angles to the
hospital
corridors, so many feet between each ward. Within the wards the beds faced each other, ranged at right angles to the side walls, so many feet between each bed. The walls were painted white in glossy paint (which
reflects
the light), and large windows were set in them, so many feet between each window. Each bed within each ward was of the same length, just too short for an
unusually
tall man. Above each bed was its own reading light, to the right its own locker, resting on each locker, its own pair of earphones, all of them tuned in at the same time to the same programme of the B.B.C., which was sometimes the Home, usually the Light, but never the Third. Each bed had an iron framework painted black, and red blankets, and white sheets. Each had one chair beside it for the use of visitors, who were allowed into the ward during Visiting Hours at the rate of not more than two visitors for each patient. Extra chairs might be brought from the centre of the ward, where they were set symmetrically around the wooden table which always stood there.

In the ceiling of each ward was a pattern of curtain rails made of polished brass. These allowed the hospital staff to isolate any bed from its fellows by drawing round it a curtain of coarse red cloth. By day such isolation would be complete, but at night, when all the individual reading lights had been switched off and the B.B.C. was silent, a light within the red curtains would allow the wakeful patients of the ward to see in silhouette all that went on inside. It was like the sort of comic turn that Boy Scouts perform at village concerts, when a shadow surge on removes from the belly of a shadow patient such
incongruous
articles as hacksaws, bicycle chains and long strings of sausages. On his first night in hospital, Charles himself watched such a performance. He watched a man die.

Sharp-eyed in the dark, the watching patients saw a shadow priest administer a shadow sacrament, while the dying man lay passively on the bed, and the priest leaned over him to catch the last confession of some shadow sin. They watched the shadow nurse sit by his side reading
Picturegoer
, and the slow occasional stirrings of the man in the bed, made only, it seemed, as if to show that life was not done yet, not quite done, not until at last the man jerked upwards a little, and bubbled, and snored, and stopped, and was gone for ever, leaving only his body on the bed. Then they watched the departure of the shadow nurse to report, and waited out the hour that went by before the dead man could indeed be treated as dead. All the deft routine of laying-out, they watched in
shadow-play
. They saw the shadow nurse shave the dead body, dab wet swabs on its eyes, strip it, fold its hands neatly beneath its buttocks, tie its toes together, slip a bandage beneath its chin so that it should not stiffen grotesquely awry, and finally ease it into its shroud. Then she let the bib of the shroud fall over the body’s face, and made all safe with cotton, biting the thread when the task was
done. She summoned the porters. Soundlessly on rubber wheels the trolley was brought to the bedside, and the corpse transferred to it to be taken off to the hospital mortuary. Only then was the light switched off, and the performance over.

“Will you take note of that now?” said the Irishman in the next bed. “They’ll have someone else in it when we wake in the morning.”

But in the morning the bed was empty and freshly made, and it was not reoccupied until midday.

*

“Well,” the doctor said, “what the hell did you think
you
were doing?”

When Charles did not reply, the doctor sat down on the chair next to the bed, and motioned to Sister that she might leave them together. She nodded, and went swiftly through the swing doors at the end of the ward. “She disapproves of psychiatrists,” the doctor said. “You can’t blame her really. I disapprove of them myself. We’re not much more than a sort of confidence trick really. Still, a man must live.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Had a chap in here the other day,” the doctor said. “Same trouble. Pills, stomach pump—all that fuss! He said he’d taken the pills by mistake in a cinema. It was some sort of Western, and he couldn’t stand the racket. Thought he’d go to sleep for a while, had the pills in his pocket, took one, and couldn’t stop. Said it was like eating sweets. Same sort of compulsion. I believed him. I’d
believe
any story under these circumstances, you know.”

Charles said nothing.

“I mean it. When you came into this hospital, we saved your life. You may think that was interfering, but it’s our job; we have to do it. The next job, as I see it, is to make sure you’re not prosecuted for attempted suicide.
We don’t think that being prosecuted does people much good, you see. In our experience, it sometimes depresses them so much that they go straight off and try again. This chap I was talking about, now; he’d come down in the world a bit. Thrown out of his job with an insurance company for doing a bit of fiddling, found work as a waiter, gone to live in Stepney, and felt the difference. I take it you’re not in any trouble of that kind.”

“I was tight.”

“That’s a start. You mistook the bottle?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Can you think of anything you mistook the bottle
for
? Indigestion tablets? Alka Seltzer? You had to go out, and didn’t want people to know you’d been drinking.”

“What people?”

“Well, that’s a point, isn’t it? Haven’t you any friends who’d care whether you were tight or not?”

Charles said, “It wasn’t premeditated or anything. I really was tight. It was just a sort of impulse.”

“You haven’t thought of suicide before then?”

Again a silence. “I suppose I have,” Charles said.

“Often?”

“Not often. I get moods of depression.”

“What’s your job?”

“Journalist.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“I work for a trade paper. It’s mostly advertisements and reports of conferences. The University
Appointments
’ Board put me on to it after the Foreign Office had turned me down. Does that answer your question?”

“I’m sorry. You live on your own?”

“Yes.”

“Parents far away? I hope you don’t mind my asking all these questions.”

“That’s your job, isn’t it? My parents live in
Devonshire
on the edge of Dartmoor. My father’s retired. He was in the Army. I have two brothers. One works in an advertising agency. I don’t see him often because I don’t like his wife. The other’s in a bank in Bombay.”

“How did you get hold of the pills?”

“Hay fever.”

“Of course. Have you got any more? You won’t need them. It’s late in the season.”

“I took them all.”

“Good. Of course there’s always the gas. We can’t have that cut off. And we can’t take away your braces and razor blades or blunt the edges of your kitchen knives. We can’t isolate you from high buildings or buses or railway trains or the river Thames. You’re quite free to make a better job of it next time if you want to.
Do
you want to?”

“What do you expect me to answer?”

“You could tell the truth, if you know what it is in this case. Even if you say ‘Yes’ we shall have to discharge you, now you’re well again.”

“I don’t know.”

“What about going home to Devon for a bit? Think things over. Would that be a good idea? We’ll give you a bit of paper to show to your boss.”

“You won’t tell them?”

“No, of course not. A minor breakdown. You need a week in the country to get over it. You should even get paid while you’re away. It’s only actors and builders’ labourers nowadays who don’t get paid when they’re sick.”

“I
could
go home,” Charles said.

“If you get on well with your father and mother. Some don’t.”

“About as well as most people do, I suppose.”

“Well, we haven’t got time to go into that now.” The doctor sighed. He was so brown in his white coat, so middle-aged and secure, smelling so pleasantly of
antiseptics
and tobacco, that suddenly Charles felt the urge to be rude to him. “I suppose this is all part of the routine,” he said, “even the sigh.”

“More or less,” the doctor said equably, “after all you are a patient, you know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. I’m glad to see you taking an interest.” The doctor stood up. “Of course, if while you’re home you should decide to talk things over with your parents— or just with one of them—father?—mother?—
whichever
’s easiest, you might find that would help you to work things out a bit. But I’ll leave it to you. After all, you know them much better than I do.”

Charles smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t think…. Well, it’d be a bit much for my father. He’s getting on and all that.”

“Perhaps you’d rather talk to one of us about it when you get back. Ring me up, and we’ll make an
appointment
. All right? Better still—we’ll make one now.” He produced a white card from the pocket of his doctor’s coat, scribbled on it, and put it on top of Charles’ locker. Then off he went, purposefully down the ward, followed by Sister who had materialized suddenly when he rose to go.

Charles watched him go. Then, since there didn’t seem to be much else to do, he listened to Music While You Work for half an hour, and then to another half hour of some Reg or Stan or Steve on the cinema organ, and then to a record programme of requests by people in the armed services, and then, just as the News came on, so did lunch, which was poached white fish, boiled potatoes, and cabbage rather over-steamed in a pressure cooker.
“Can I buy a postcard?” Charles said to the nurse who brought it, and she replied, “Well, really! You’ll be discharged this afternoon. Can’t you get one then.”

So that afternoon Charles brought a coloured picture postcard of the National Gallery, showing part of Trafalgar Square, and sent it to his parents to tell them that he’d be arriving on Saturday morning.