Читать книгу The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books - Elspeth Davie - Страница 8

FOLLOWING THE FIRST heavy snowfall of the year, a huge heart appeared on the bowling-green next to the hospital grounds. It was deeply marked out in the snow, and for sheer size – as seen from the height of the new hospital buildings – it was an eye-opener. It was the biggest shape that could be put inside the green without running over onto the surrounding paths; and whoever made it had been careful not to spoil his line. He had walked narrowly backwards, foot behind foot, and let his stick swallow up most of his prints. There was a line of chunky footsteps leading up to it, a line leading away, and no other marks.

The bowling-green was not connected with the hospital. High hedges made it private. Yet it was visible only from the hospital windows. All during summer and up till late autumn, when the green was closed, old men bent and swung their arms over a lawn smooth as a billiard table. Patients and visitors to the hospital were used to the sight of an endless turnover of players. There were bowlers strong as bulls down there as well as old men on their last legs. There were bossy bowlers and browbeaten bowlers. But whatever they were, domineering or defeated, the place was geared to age. Overnight the snow and the heart had changed all that. While the old men had been sleeping or sitting in their clubs or pubs their place had been smoothed out and engraved. A rejuvenation had taken place, and they were to know nothing of it.

The hospital staff were too busy in the morning to do much more than glance at the bowling-green in passing. It was left to the afternoon visitors who were always in the high corridor on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and at week-ends, waiting to be beckoned into certain medical and surgical wards on the stroke of three. The place where they waited was at the top of the building – a wide corridor with a staircase and a line of lifts at one end. Opposite were the swing doors leading through to the wards. On the window side it was almost entirely glass divided up by strips of metal and it was here that visitors lined up while they waited. They varied from day to day but most of them were long-distance people who had arrived early. Amongst these were the few who came to visit long-term patients and who formed a small in-group amongst the random coming and going of the rest. They were a clique who had their own private and sometimes silent language. They recognized one another and formed bonds even though they might have no clue to the other end of the attachment – the man, woman or child in the beds beyond.

On this particular afternoon half a dozen or so were waiting at the windows. They were glad, in a businesslike way, to see the snow. They were glad to see the heart. Any new thing at all on the way to the wards was something to be grateful for and visitors to long-term patients had to be particularly skilled collectors of news items, no matter how small or unimportant. Delivery of news was always a chancy affair. There was no knowing how long their patients might take over the bits they were given. Events which should have provided talk for an hour could be brushed aside in a matter of seconds. Patients had been known to listen lackadaisically to news packets containing a cease-fire and a new war, and grasp at the tale of a bad egg in a bowl. Today the early visitors at the window were too tired to go overboard for this heart. They had seen better last minute talking-points in their time. All the same they took it and filed it amongst other items where, with luck, it might fill a gap. While most of them collected it silently and turned to other things, one man remarked to the woman beside him that he would be telling his son about this.

‘He’ll be amused when I tell him,’ he said. ‘I mean the grotesque size of that thing will intrigue him.’ It was a grave mistake indeed to make any pronouncement on what would or would not amuse or please one’s patient. Few experienced visitors risked it. But there was a desperate streak in this man. The woman listened pleasantly to him and said that no doubt she too would be telling her daughter. But she knew it was a very different matter. The man’s son had been here a long time and he would not get better. Her daughter, in a surgical ward, was getting better every day. Occasionally the man talked about his son, though rarely about his illness.

‘He is rather difficult to please,’ he had said one afternoon a few weeks earlier. ‘He’s inclined to find fault.’ And some time after he had said: ‘You know, he is very, very difficult to please. He finds fault with everything and everyone.’

‘Poor fellow,’ she had replied.

‘And I’m afraid I irritate him,’ said the father.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But of course it’s not really you.’

‘I don’t know whether it’s really me or not me. I just know I seem to irritate him more and more every day.’

One way or another the woman had got to know a bit about this man. His wife was dead, and there were not many other people to share the visits with him. His son, who had just finished his architect’s training, had one good friend who wrote regularly from his new job in Canada. A few other friends took turns to visit him. Some had stopped for good. He’d had a girl friend once but she had disappeared early in his illness. ‘Naturally enough – or unnaturally, whichever way you want to look at it,’ said the man. There was this difficulty about hospitals and long-term visitors felt it most. As they went on it grew harder and harder to figure out what was natural and what was unnatural about the set-up. And it was not only the place which set them problems. They worried about themselves. Were they becoming less human or more human? And which was best under the circumstances? They sank and surfaced again, alternating in mood with those in the wards who sank and surfaced continually. The boy’s father had been depressed himself for some time. But this afternoon he seemed cheerful, as though the snow, by levelling cracks and ridges and smoothing all anomalies of building and landscape, had made it possible to start again from the beginning.

The bowling-green was not the only thing visitors could look down at. The hospital was built round three sides of a large courtyard, and down there was a new fountain with two fish mouths which would one day blow water. There were a few newly-planted saplings, and three small flower beds sunk in the paving-stones, ready for planting. Triangles and oblongs of red, blue and yellow enamel had been set in a pattern along the side of the concrete wall which ran under the hedge on the bowling-green side. But the visitors, like ungrateful children, never looked at these things – or if they did it was only momentarily before staring above and beyond at scenes not intended for them. They looked across at the windows of the west-wing wards. There they could see distant figures in beds – spry figures sitting bolt upright, half-reclining figures with knees sharply angled under red and blue blankets, and flat-out figures. The corridor people never wearied of this spectacle. It seemed that the people in the distant beds were more interesting and more mysterious than their own relatives in the nearby wards. This afternoon they looked across and saw the scene transformed. Bits of the outside world had invaded the inside. Nurses were moving about over there with caps white as the snowcaps on the chimney-pots. They were bouncing up pillows which were smaller versions of the fat snow-pillows below. A few outgoing scarlet capes were moving along the path towards the gates. It was not only the boy’s father who was cheered. The others also felt hope in the air, though it was mixed with ice. They were anxious that it should not melt too quickly.

On the stroke of three the swing doors burst open and were fastened against brass hinges on either side. They were being beckoned in by a familiar, smiling nurse. But the man stayed behind talking with the woman for a few minutes longer. He was telling her something and it was easy enough to guess what was happening. He was no more telling it to her than he was telling it to the fire extinguisher. He was simply rehearsing in detail what he would tell his son.

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he was saying, ‘I’d no sooner got in than my neighbours came round for a chat, and to tell me about their latest bed-and-breakfast. They do it summer and winter – have done for years. And do you know who this latest man turns out to be? A first-class chef turned preacher. Imagine it. He’d been giving people a great deal of pleasure, no doubt, whipping up the soufflés and concocting recipes à la Robertson or whatever his name is. And now …! Not only that, but he can’t leave well alone. He’s got to go round condemning his former job. Condemning it! Oh, that some of our present preachers would turn Sunday chefs! Would that not give us a more digestible day?’

They had now started to move through the swing doors but his voice came after her. ‘And so I see this architect on TV last night is proposing a floating city. I like the idea. Do you like the idea?’ Yes, she said, she liked it very much indeed.

‘I’ve forgotten how it would work, but every window would have this magnificent changing view. How about that?’

‘Yes, wonderful,’ said the woman. But she kept moving on because they had to be rather strict about time here and the hour passed quickly.

‘But I’m not so sure,’ his voice pursued her, ‘about the sort of city that goes a mile up into the sky.’ This time she didn’t turn round and wasn’t meant to. His eyes were already fixed on the passage to the left and on a door at the far end of it. Her own route took her up a flight of stairs and along a corridor on the other side. They parted abruptly as they always did, he to the left and she to the right.

It happened that they met again in the evening at the seven to eight visiting hour. For some time back they had come in on both afternoon and evening visits, though they did the double shift for different reasons – the man because his son was very ill, the woman because her daughter was almost well. It seemed the two extremes demanded most. For the second time that day they stood at the plate glass windows staring across. But the transformation from afternoon to evening was always spectacular. In place of solid buildings were row upon row of incandescent light cubes set in blackness, giving a vision which was almost clairvoyant into the rooms opposite. Here and there among the white cubes were a few dim rooms lit by blue, and visitors tended to stare at these with particular intensity as though the distant blue rooms held the secret of life and death – a secret being unaccountably withheld from themselves. Tonight, however, brightness came from the ground as well as the walls. Even the skimpy trees spiked with snow looked theatrical. On the bowling-green the line of the heart showed up thicker and clearer than before.

As usual, the man and the woman arrived early, and after their first few comments, they fell silent. It was not a vast silence but the woman decided it was too long for comfort. They did not know one another well enough for this. She had also become accustomed to the non-silence policy of the hospital. This was not made too obvious but it could be felt. When necessary a good deal of chatter, not to say clatter, covered certain black pits of feeling. Even the brisk rattle of curtain rails round an emotion was better than nothing. The woman could chatter herself when she had a mind to.

‘If the forecast’s anything to go by it’s to be colder than ever,’ she said. ‘But no more snow meantime. Well, thank goodness for that. The bus had the worst time ever on that hill tonight. There was one moment I thought we’d all be out on the road pushing. What’s your opinion of double-deckers on a hill like that? Last year there were letters to the paper. Do you think double-deckers are dangerous on that particular stretch?’ The man nodded but gave no opinion, so she answered for him. ‘Yes, they are more dangerous and not just in snow – in a wind too. In a high wind they can pitch and swing like a ship at sea.’ Again there was silence as they stared ahead. The woman took courage from the brilliant patches of light below. ‘What did your son think of the cook?’ she asked, smiling. The man unfocused his gaze reluctantly. His eyebrows indicated a complete noncomprehension. ‘The chef turning preacher,’ said the woman with still unfaltering brightness.

‘Oh that.’ He waved it impatiently aside. ‘Absolutely nothing. It didn’t interest him at all. There was nothing to it, of course.’ The woman could have stopped there. She was virtually being invited to take no interest in anything herself. But she felt the need to go further. ‘The floating city – what does he make of that idea? If it doesn’t sound ludicrous to put it that way – isn’t it his line of country?’

‘He hardly heard it. He thought it scarcely worth while listening.’

The woman looked down quickly and started to rearrange some of the things in her bag, but a moment later she was startled by his tense voice, suddenly much louder. ‘There was one thing he took up. One thing he listened to. He took great exception to my mention of the heart.’ The woman stopped rustling in her bag and took a quick look down at it. She had almost forgotten it was there.

‘Never again!’ said the man. ‘What a mistake to talk about outside things. How stupid I’ve become. How thick!’

‘But what happened?’

‘Nothing – except he worked himself into a fury. And don’t think,’ said the man as though picking her up, ‘don’t think he’ll forget it. I know my son. He’s going to lie there and meditate on hearts and the people who draw hearts.’

Sometimes the doors would be opened for early visitors. It happened this evening. At least fifteen minutes before time the friendly nurse came through and wedged them back. She noticed that this pair were tired and that the cold glass where they leaned had taken colour from their cheeks. They looked deserving of comfort, of some privilege for themselves. But whatever it was they didn’t take it. They acknowledged the open door but remained where they were.

‘Who are they then?’ said the woman. ‘Who are these people who draw hearts?’

‘Vandals!’ the man cried. ‘And no different from any other kind. So he says. Secret vandals!’ They both stared at the bowling-green, the woman in some surprise, the man with bitterness. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘harmless this time. That he admits. But whoever could do that could do it in much worse and lasting ways. It’s the brand-new hearts chiselled on standing stones he’s thinking of, hearts dug out of trees and slashed across pillars. He’s seen himself a hideous double heart complete with dates and arrows branded on a temple wall. Can you blame him? Buildings are his job. Oh, it’s not only hearts! He is thinking of every effacement he ever set eyes on. And I set him off!’

‘It will melt,’ said the woman who could think of nothing better to say.

‘But not from his mind,’ said the man. ‘I know my son.’ He turned and walked quickly away through the open door. The woman waited on for a bit. She felt she was getting to know the young man too. And she had to admit that with the best will in the world she didn’t absolutely care for the sound of him. Had never in fact cared. On the whole her opinion was that illness made neither devils nor angels. She took the view that it brought out and perhaps exaggerated what was already there. From what she had heard, there was and always had been a born complainer there. Long before his illness he had complained. She had never seen him and she was exceedingly sorry for him. She was sorry for any obsessions he might have. But she was not, she was thankful to say, obliged to like him.

She didn’t see the father next day. But on the following afternoon they met in the corridor. It was colder than ever – colder if possible than on the last few days. Not a scrap of snow had melted or shifted. On the trees the snow blossoms had set like icing sugar. The heart on the bowling-green had not altered its shape by a single ice crystal. It was clear when the man spoke that his son had not altered his views either. He was preoccupied with vandalism. It had been no good trying to change the subject. The boy had kept an irritable silence before bursting out in the same vein. They had not mentioned the heart again, but it was the basis of the business. And the vandalism had broadened to include all spoilings in country as well as city, past damage and damage to come.

‘Is it so strange?’ said the father. ‘He’s an architect, isn’t he? As far as he’s concerned nothing in its final shape comes up to what was planned. Everything falls short. Just now he exaggerates. Yes. But he was always like that. His expectations are high.’

‘I’m sure,’ said the woman quickly.

‘A perfectionist.’

‘Yes, of course he is!’

‘And such people can be reminded, can be irritated by things which the rest of us …’

‘Oh, I know that!’ she exclaimed. The man looked exhausted with the effort of explanation. He took a deep breath before saying:

‘But I’ve a feeling this evening will be different. We’ll get off the subject. Why not? It was an accident that it ever got into the picture at all. He will forget.’ He dropped his eyes to the bowling-green. They both stared at the heart. Engraved as it was out of a substance which might vanish at any instant, it had kept its shape. It seemed innocent and at the same time bold – a peaceful, yet a childishly stubborn shape. In the absence of initials, arrows, prints of any kind, there was no message to be read. But emptiness gave it power. It was no longer strange. Already it was part of the surroundings. It was a harmonious shape, and the woman decided it was benign. But she wondered how the man saw it now. As a deliberate disfigurement? A shape, meaningless and gross, perhaps, set there to try the endurance of his son and himself.

It had begun to snow slightly again at the evening visiting hour, but the corridor was crowded as usual for Saturday was a popular day for family visits. There were plenty of new faces and tonight even the regulars were in good form. The snow had put fight into them. They were not prepared to make a mystery out of this building. It was something to get in from the cold, and they expressed some envy for the patients in their snug beds. There came a point when even illness must be kept in its place. There was a big difference between being alive and being dead and it had better not be forgotten. At any rate, ribaldry, in place of awe, was long overdue in the place. It was a night for comparing fat and thin sisters, for stripping doctors of the laundered coat. Surgeons were scrutinized as either wilder than the wildest maniac or staid as councillors, and the immaculate matron in her virgin pie-ruff must be sacrificed to one or other of them before the night was out. There were few doctors around just now. It was not the time for doctors. But when one did appear as though by accident, going slowly past looking neither to right nor left, the relatives stared boldly after him. They were controlling the desire to spring forward and wrench an answer out of him – an explanation, a diagnosis, or even a plain yes or no. The stray doctor was aware of this. He kept his eyes fixed on a distant mark at the end of the corridor in an effort to maintain dignity and keep his footing on the spotless floor when on every side the endlessly questioning eyes threatened to topple him up.

The young man’s father was not among the earliest arrivals tonight. He came on the dot of seven and disappeared immediately in the direction of the wards. This time the woman was ahead of him but she looked back once and got a quick response. He waved. His smile was cheerful, as though he’d quickly caught the mood of the evening and had no intention of being odd man out. The woman waited for him in the corridor when the hour was up. It was not an evening for formalities or reserve.

‘And how was he?’ she asked at once as he came up. ‘Did you manage to get off that subject?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I did not. And we are back to square one.’

‘The bowling-green?’

‘Oh, I thought that at any rate was over and done with. But he’d thought of something else. How am I to put it to you?’

‘Tell me then.’

‘He was upset, to put it mildly, brooding now on the fact that the heart down there has nothing inside it, none of the usual appendages. No words or signs. Not a mark. If it’s to be properly denounced it must conform, and this one has not come up to expectation. It says nothing. It gives nothing. It is not even a lasting blot on the landscape. This empty heart is not enough for him it seems!’ The man had forgotten to subdue his voice to the required hospital mildness. It got louder as he went on and ended on a note of pain. One or two people glanced sympathetically at him in passing. One or two looked annoyed. He had become a threat to the hard-won mood of cheer.

The woman didn’t move or speak for a long time. She was looking straight in front of her out of the window. It was still snowing and there was a slight wind. It was hard to see how the fine flakes would ever touch ground. At one moment they formed spirals in the air and at another, slanting lines which shifted, or on sudden gusts blew upward higher and higher until the widely separating flakes disappeared into darkness overhead. All the same, the thin layer of snow had already altered things below. The two lines of footsteps on the bowling-green were almost obliterated. The centre of the heart, shining in the light from the hospital windows, was softly padded out with new white snow. It still proclaimed itself, but gently. Now that even the footsteps were gone, this smoothing and rounding had given it a feeling of completeness and an absolute calm.

‘Do you know,’ said the woman, rousing herself at last to speak. ‘I think I shall put it to my daughter – your son’s problem, I mean. Just as a matter of interest I’d like her opinion. How would that be?’

‘Certainly. Please tell her anything you like,’ said the man politely.

‘In my opinion she’s got insight as well as common sense.’

‘I’m sure,’ said the man, keeping himself from moving off with an effort.

‘And then, of course, she is young herself.’

The man answered by making a weary obeisance in the direction of the wards. It was done without irony. He acknowledged youth while admitting that he himself was absolutely played out. Finished. Right now there was only one thing he wanted and that was to get home. He had talked so much about his son, however, and asked so little about her daughter it was up to him to stay on the spot. But the woman was moving off herself. ‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said.

Their meeting next day came at the end of the afternoon visit. It seemed casual, almost accidental. The woman was standing at the window with her back to the light, studying herself in a small handbag mirror. The absorbed, disapproving regard of the middle-aged woman for her own face disappeared as he came up. But she turned back for one more caustic glance at her left cheek.

‘Well, I’ve seen my daughter,’ she said, forcing the mirror back into her handbag’s jungle. ‘She thought about it for a long time. And I may say she has the greatest sympathy for your son’s point of view. Indeed she shares it. She understood perfectly his irritation, his frustration … But as for the heart – well, she takes a more straightforward view of that. Why worry? Why fuss about what is or isn’t inside it? It was never meant, she says, to have letters, words, signs, or anything else. That is not the style of the thing. On the other hand, it is not an empty heart.’

‘No?’ said the man.

‘I’m simply repeating her words,’ the woman said, looking at him impatiently for the first time. ‘Not an empty heart, but an open one. For anyone and everyone. One can take it or leave it, but there it is. It is fabulous, she says. It is fantastic. It is an outsize super-heart. And there is absolutely nothing more to be said about it.’

The man said nothing more about it, but he thought for a long time. ‘I shall pass on the message,’ he said at last, bowing his head, ‘… and how on earth I will manage …’

‘You’ll make nothing of it, I hope.’

‘I’ll certainly try to make it nothing. I am tempted to scoff a bit at your daughter’s view.’

‘Oh, she’s tough enough to take it! In that way – your son and my daughter – aren’t they both tough enough? And that they’ve never met and never will meet has absolutely nothing to do with it. They stand together.’

‘Indeed I hope so,’ said the man. He turned quickly away and went on past her towards the stair.

Next day the woman was occupied with other visitors to her daughter. He saw her only in passing. But they met briefly the following day at the end of the evening visit. It was hot in the corridor. The woman was complaining about the tightness of her snowboots on the thick rubber floor. The radiators at the window were scorching, and visitors emerging from lemonade-filled wards complained of thirst. Beyond the swing doors one or two women patients were already wandering about in open, flowery dressing-gowns. The nurses looked warm and pink as sun-bathers. Tonight the hospital was like a huge, hot ocean liner, stranded in ice.

‘So our promised thaw has not come after all,’ said the woman.

‘I can’t say it worries me one way or the other,’ the man replied. The woman looked at him quickly and was encouraged by something in his expression. She waited for a bit and getting no further response said:

‘And your son. Is he reconciled … to the snow?’

‘Reconciled? Never! That is not his way. He reconciles himself to nothing. He takes his own view and always will. If he does change his mind he must think it all out for himself – through it and round and over it.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said the woman. ‘But what is his view – of that?’

The man looked in the direction of the bowling-green and away again. Yet the woman was still encouraged by something about him. She was now reduced to pointing directly down at the heart. The man consented to look at it again but said nothing. He was stubborn like his son.

‘Oh well then,’ said the woman. ‘What is your view of it?’

The man shrugged his shoulders and glanced down. He considered it as though measuring it, as though matching it up against all other possible shapes.

‘Oh – the size of that thing!’ he exclaimed at last. ‘The extravagance! Isn’t it a regular pantomime piece …?’

‘Yes, yes,’ agreed the woman, and waited.

The man shook his head as though finished with what he had to say. Nevertheless he put down the bag he was carrying and opened his arms wide, bringing them slowly together again into a circle with only the tips of his fingers joined. For an instant he enfolded the empty space in front of him. He demonstrated an almost imperceptible capture, an embrace.

‘It is a not unfriendly shape,’ the man said, dropping his arms and picking up his bag again.

But the woman seemed perfectly satisfied with these words. At once she began to move away from the window, taking care to do it with the least possible fuss or disturbance to the man looking down on the bowling-green. As she was a large woman and rather clumsy, it was not easy. It was a case of drawing on her gloves without moving her elbows, of sorting out a complication of handbag and carrier-bag straps while pulling down her helmet shaped cap over her ears. She managed not to open her mouth again. She didn’t look in his direction. Padded with clothes, strapped and helmeted, like a diver she moved, silently, in rubber boots over the rubber floor. Slowly, cautiously – yet with some hint of deep-sea buoyancy in her gait – she drifted off.