He experienced a nightmare in which many swords pierced his heart. Although not a religious man, he was distressed upon waking up by the bad taste his unconscious mind had shown in trafficking with this particular icono-graphical motif. It was another instance, he supposed, of the bobbing up on him of that adolescent absorption in painting. But however that might be, it didn’t help with the phobia. He now became obsessed with the idea of mirrors. He had fantasies in which, stark naked, he paraded the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. Or he merely – what was better – visited his tailor (needfully enough, since nude still) and there manipulated the system of swinging mirrors which afforded one a view of oneself front, back and sides at once. Oddly enough, this embarrassing nonsense appeared to have a therapeutic effect. His anxieties gradually died away.
He was able to read. He became aware of this when he noticed that part of the hospital staff wore coloured buttons or badges on their jackets or aprons. The younger doctors (or perhaps they were students) did, and with them the plain colour appeared to afford all the information that had to be given. But the badges of some of the nurses were lettered as well, and it was one of these that Firth first managed to decipher. This was displayed by an elderly and responsible woman who appeared to do little except keep an eye on other people. Sometimes, however, she combed and brushed Firth’s hair – or the half of it which was now free of the diminishing bandages. He had been horrified when first aware of this being done, but now he had come rather to like it. It seemed an action sufficiently marginal in terms of strict nursing necessities to afford him (with a decent tenuousness) the sensation of a man perversely pretending to be a small boy in the hands of a woman. And when he read what her badge said, he managed to be amused for the first time since all this had begun happening to him. The badge said: After-care Sister. He wondered whether this had been thought up by way of boosting morale. If it was after-care one was having, then things couldn’t be too bad.
It was the After-care Sister, however, who brought about his relapse – his nervous or neurotic relapse, that is to say. She did this by carelessly leaving on the coverlet of his bed for a moment something which he was also able to read, at least in part. It was some sort of form or chart, he saw, upon which they wrote up his progress day by day, and he managed to make out one word of the last sentence entered on it. The word was uneventful. This, too, was reassuring. It must represent the official view of his recovery, convalescence, or whatever they called it. Feeling almost cheerful, he let his glance discreetly travel to the top of the form, where there was some sort of printed heading in small type. What this said was:
Graft and Transplant Unit: Male Ward
After this, Firth had another quite mad spell about mirrors. And eventually he managed to get hold of a real looking-glass. He did this by simulating a kind of fresh dawn of vanity during the hair-brushing business. The After-care Sister, doubtless pleased by this show of interest on the part of an ominously withdrawn patient, tactfully left the looking-glass beside him so that he could further admire himself in decent privacy. Firth felt his heart—his heart?—thumping in its cavern. No sooner had the woman turned away than he tore open his pyjama jacket and held the small looking-glass before his bared chest. He saw what everything sane in him told him he would see, what his finger-tips, indeed, had long since assured him of: an expanse of undisturbed white flesh.
He became aware that somebody was standing beside his bed – not one of the nurses, but an elderly man, vaguely familiar to him, and of formidable presence. It was plain that this was the boss of the whole show. Suddenly, for the first time, Firth’s head was completely clear – even clear enough for him to feel embarrassed at having been detected in his small pathological performance.
‘You see,’ Firth said foolishly, ‘It’s Binchy. He’s been on my mind.’
‘Ah, Binchy.’ The elderly man spoke as if he perfectly knew who Binchy was (as, indeed, he probably did) but was not particularly interested in Firth’s remark. ‘Things have been going very well, Mr Firth – very well, indeed.’ He tapped Firth’s right arm with great friendliness and cheerfulness. ‘We can have the last of these things off now, I think, and tomorrow our friends here can get going on the exercises.’
‘Yes – the exercises,’ Firth said meekly, although he had no notion of what the man was talking about. ‘I don’t often risk prophecy, but this time I don’t mind sticking my neck out.’ The elderly man picked up the looking-glass and with what was apparently a profound unconsciousness put in a moment studying his own features with quiet satisfaction. ‘It’s going to be entirely successful – and for the first time in the history of surgery.’
‘I congratulate you,’ Firth said. Congratulations seemed, somehow, more appropriate than thanks when it was a matter of having been transformed into a historical object. ‘But may I ask—’
The surgeon, however, was looking at his watch. It was with the air of a man who, although weightily occupied, finds rather against expectation that he has some small space of leisure at his command.
‘My dear Mr Firth,’ he said, ‘shall we have a glass of sherry? They keep a very decent fino for one or two of us here.’
So they had a glass of sherry, and then Michael Firth was shown his new forefinger and thumb. Sir Horace Rumford (for that was the surgeon’s name) explained to him that his old forefinger and thumb had been so crushed as to be useless. ‘Absolutely useless,’ Rumford said with what was almost an air of reproach. ‘Nothing whatever to be done with them. They simply had to be thrown away.’
‘I see.’ Firth felt apologetic. He also found himself (for he was now sitting up) glancing round the highly polished floor of the ward and even under the other beds – Rumford having concluded this part of his communication on a note of impatience suggesting that he might simply have chucked those abandoned parts of Firth into a corner.
‘But it just so happened that we were deuced lucky in what came in. As neat as anything for months.’
‘From the race-track?’ Firth asked nervously, looking the finger and thumb.
‘No, no – not that kind of person at all. Will you have cigarette, my dear Firth? Frowned on, rather, in these places. But why not?’ He produced a gold cigarette-case and helped Firth light up. ‘Now what were we saying?’
‘There is a race-track – a circuit, or whatever it’s called?’
‘Dear me, yes. But you haven’t been—um—linked up with it in any way.’ Rumford spoke as if acknowledging that there would have been an impropriety in providing a member of a learned profession with such a linkage. ‘The airport. A shocking business.’
‘I see,’ Firth said again. He was consulting his own inside, expecting it to tell him that he felt slightly sick. But this wasn’t so. In fact, what he was chiefly conscious of was that he was enjoying his cigarette. ‘Just what kind of person?’ he asked.
‘At first, I’m afraid, the exercises will have to be rather tediously elementary.’ Ignoring Firth’s question, Rumford spoke rapidly. ‘Rolling bread pellets. Picking up pencils. Then picking up matches. That kind of thing. Our young friends here have it all worked out.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Firth was conscious of displaying himself as somewhat lacking in conversational resource.
‘Then there will be the stage at which you attempt to recover your customary signature. I shall be most interested in that. Your bank manager too, eh?’ Sir Horace laughed, and then appeared struck by a sudden misgiving. ‘You’re not left-handed, by any chance?’ he asked.
‘Definitely not.’ Firth looked curiously at his hand. There was a hair-line in bright scarlet round the root of the thumb, but no other trace of surgery. Nevertheless, the thumb did faintly suggest itself as not belonging to the hand. And the index-finger did this much more definitely. With conscious caution, he placed his left hand side by side with his right on the coverlet of the bed.
‘Pretty good, eh?’ Sir Horace took it for granted that his patient was admiring what he saw. ‘A mod
est milestone in surgical history, as I said. I dare say they’ll call it Rumfordising – ha-ha!’
‘Ha-ha!’ Firth articulated. He remembered that there had been somebody called Count von Rumford who invented a patent chimney. The poet Coleridge—or had it been Wordsworth?—had been enthusiastic about Rumfordising. Perhaps Sir Horace was a descendant of the Count’s. Noticing how idly he turned this over in his mind, and with how little effort he managed to laugh at the surgeon’s not particularly scintillating joke, Firth realised the vastness of his own relief. His absurd morbidity – phobia, as he had rightly called it – had vanished. Now he had only to rejoice that, after all, virtually nothing had happened to him.
‘But you haven’t told me,’ he said, suddenly remembering this, ‘what sort of person the donor was. I suppose that’s the proper word?’
‘My dear sir, I must ask you to reflect.’ Rumford was abruptly speaking in a changed voice. And with a changed manner, too. It was as if he had slipped a white gauze mask over his nose and mouth, and were speaking in a professional, almost a hieratic, character. ‘It is in every regard desirable that anonymity should be preserved in these cases. We therefore make it a matter of etiquette.’
‘I see.’ Falling back on this expression yet again, Firth found that he imported into it a certain element of imperfect conviction. He hadn’t intended to do so. Perhaps he had been slightly irritated by something portentous in Rumford’s enunciation of ‘etiquette’. But it was the chap’s own business, and Firth was perfectly willing to drop the matter. Rumford, however, himself continued with it.
‘Pray consider again,’ he said severely. ‘Were you to be made aware of the donor’s identity, and then to encounter him socially, embarrassment might well ensue.’
‘Encounter him!’ There was stupefaction in Firth’s voice. ‘You mean he’s alive?’
‘It seems that I have inadvertently admitted as much.’ Sir Horace was frowning majestically. He was also looking at his watch. ‘I only beg that you will not communicate the circumstance to the press.’
‘To the press! Whatever has the press—’
‘We have kept them away, so far. But, of course, they will be interested. And very properly.’ The milestone in surgical history was presumably in Sir Horace’s mind. ‘But this is something—’
‘Of course I shall say nothing about it whatever.’ Firth was indignant. ‘I should consider it a monstrous invasion of privacy. But how did this unfortunate man—?’ Firth broke off, and looked at what he would have to come to regard as his finger and thumb. ‘Why was it impossible—?’
‘The upper arm, Mr Firth. Pulp. Or perhaps a better word would be mush. Nothing whatever could be done about it, and we amputated at once. The finger and thumb, however, were eminently usable. And now, I am afraid I must leave you. Thursday is my regular day here, and I shall probably have the pleasure of seeing you once more before you are discharged. Good afternoon.’
Left to himself, Michael Firth noticed that the sherry was within his reach. He made haste to grab it and pour himself a further glass before the After-care woman came back again. He drank it off before taking another look at his hands. His left forefinger was tapering; the forefinger on his right hand was firmly square. His left thumb was slightly stiff; the thumb on his right hand, even in its unexercised ate, was supple and curiously restless. For a moment he felt in danger of a recurrence of some foolish state of mind, and then he made an effort to reach out and grasp – that was the word – a due sense of proportion. After all, he told himself whimsically, if his right hand offended him he could always shove it in his trouser-pocket.
3
Firth and his wife came out of their respective hospitals on the same day. (It really had been a quite simple car smash.) Camilla’s injury had not been dangerous, but it had immobilised her in a curious way and required a great deal of intensive medical care. Her nose had been sheared off, so that it was necessary to grow her a new one. For this purpose one of her arms had been positioned in a skilful manner, and she had been obliged to keep quite still and not to talk. The operation was very successful.
In fact, it was startlingly successful, just as her husband’s had been. The plastic-surgeon had been provided with photographs (and even with an oil painting commissioned by Firth some years before from one of his artistic acquaintances). But the surgeon had found these guide-lines contradictory and unsatisfactory, and had been obliged to go ahead on his own. He had grown Camilla a really beautiful nose (which it isn’t difficult for a plastic-surgeon to do). He had also (what is, on the other hand, tricky and dodgy) grown her a beautiful nose which quite notably harmonised with her existing features. The result was extremely striking. ‘Tis not a lip or eye we beauty call,’ the satisfied specialist had quoted to his pupils, ‘But the joint force and full result of all.’
The new Camilla was triumphant, and Firth himself was very pleased. Occasionally, however, he had to own to feeling a shade disconcerted. A childless couple, he and Camilla had contrived to remain fond of each other largely by developing a technique of unobtrusive inattention, and a certain effort of readjustment was required now that there was something novel and improved to look at across the breakfast-table. All the same, Firth was delighted. He resolved to have Camilla’s portrait painted again by a better class of artist than before.
They recuperated in Switzerland. Firth himself had not much taste for those papier-mâché mountains, tinny lakes and tidy towns, but Camilla had been to school in Vevey and was fond of the place. Knowing that he would be bored, Firth contrived to smuggle out with him a good deal of work from the office. There were, after all, considerable arrears of stuff too important for subordinates to be let attend to. So he sat on the balcony of their enormous room in the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes, mulling contentedly over his papers, occasionally staring across the lake at the rocks of Meillerie and the spurs of the Dent d’Oche. Camilla went round shopping, or read La Nouvelle Heloïse. It was all pleasant enough. Yet Firth continued at times to be put out by Camilla’s new look. It stirred up in him something from quite far back in his past, and this something was the more disturbing in that it didn’t appear to be in the least amative. It was more like a prompting to some purely contemplative activity. Above all, it was elusive. Experienced in the dining-room of the Trois Couronnes – lofty, full of slabby marble, bizarrely peopled by an English upper-middle class left over from the Edwardian age, productive on demand of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or boiled rice and prunes: experienced amid this solid ambiance, anything elusive seemed altogether out of place. If it was merely the consequence of Camilla’s nose – he found himself thinking just occasionally – it would be a relief if she could do with it as he did with his own recent acquisition. He had, in fact, formed the habit of going about with his right hand in his trouser-pocket.
But, of course, it had remained his working hand. His signature with it, if it was not quite his old signature, was yet firm and undeviating. As he scribbled notes in the margin of legal documents before returning them to London, it was with all his accustomed legibility and fluency. He enjoyed using the slim gold pencil he had owned for years; if anything, its fine chasing and its full weight in his hand afforded him a small sensuous satisfaction he didn’t recall before. Whether with this pencil, or with a few coloured ball-points he had upon some prompting acquired in a cheap shop, he found himself coming to do a good deal of doodling. This had been no habit of his for years – but, of course, its reappearance now was simply a carry-over from that phase of constant controlled exercises through which he had been put by Sir Horace Rumford’s young friends. He had enjoyed the exercises; had enjoyed his progressive ability to employ his new finger and thumb with precision. Now these doodles, which came from inside his head and were quite uninfluenced by the operatic prospects to be enjoyed from the superior apartments of a hotel on the Lake of Geneva, had themselves a quality of the precise. They didn’t seem to have much else, and at times Firth found himself suffi
ciently attending to them to be aware of a feeling of dissatisfaction.
This was the state of affairs – ominous, although he had no notion of the fact – when he and Camilla returned to England.
Naturally enough, Camilla’s London parties had a character quite different from that of the small affairs she organised when they were at Spindle. In the country she admired the lesser landed gentry, and provided somebody was of consequence within a couple of parishes, she didn’t at all mind that he had never been heard of beyond them. She even expressed a high regard for Mr Baxendale and Dr Roxburgh, as men holding an appointed place in what she called a cohesive traditional society. But in town Camilla pursued larger game, and with considerable success. She had family connections which helped; and her husband, although he couldn’t be called much of a draw, was properly unobtrusive, civil, and welcoming. On the whole, however, she deserved to have her little salon described as all her own work. She was very clever at bargaining with other women of similar mind, trading celebrities rather as small boys swop stamps. Jokes went round about this, and were sometimes retailed to Firth by unwary persons who supposed him to be merely one of Camilla’s less noteworthy guests. For example, as a small girl at a Christmas party Camilla was supposed to have said to another small girl, ‘You introduce me to Diaghileff, and I’ll introduce you to Massine.’ The ‘in’ character of this joke, although a shade vieux jeu, was judged to make it very funny.
Camilla’s cards sometimes said things like (if not quite like) To meet Monsieur Picasso, or For the honour of presentation to the Dowager Empress of China. But she didn’t overdo this, and it was generally understood that her special thing was less the positively first eminences than (as it were) second-string lions who for some casual reason were momentarily enjoying an enhanced celebrity. These people were commonly not put on the card, since the idea was that you were going to be surprised as well as delighted at meeting them. Camilla’s taste was quite catholic. On one occasion there might be a visiting sheik, confidentially described as the richest man in the world; on another, it would be a pop singer who had suffered the misfortune of being led in manacles through the street; on yet another, one might find oneself endeavouring to converse with an Italian peasant or Belgian garage-hand who had won an international bicycle race. Certainly Camilla loved something up-to-date. She adored, she would tell you laughing, what her dear grandmother had called le dernier cri.
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