“Stop pitying yourself.”
Thaw opened his mouth to protest, noticed he was pitying himself and shut it again. Mr. Thaw sighed and said, “Let’s agree the world is one helluva mess. What do you think will improve it?”
“A memory and a conscience. I hate the heedless way it puts on life without noticing or caring, like a rotten fruit putting on mould.”
“But Duncan, memory and conscience are human things!”
“Unluckily.”
“Is it a God you want?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s a big continual loving man I want who shares the pain of his people. It’s an impossibility I want.”
Mr. Thaw pushed flat some wisps of hair on his head and said, “My father was elder in a Congregationalist church in Bridgeton: a poor place now but a worse one then. One time the well-off members subscribed to give the building a new communion table, an organ and coloured windows. But he was an industrial blacksmith with a big family. He couldnae afford to give money, so he gave ten years of unpaid work as church officer, sweeping and dusting, polishing the brasses and ringing the bell for services. At the foundry he was paid less the more he aged, but my mother helped the family by embroidering tablecloths and napkins. Her ambition was to save a hundred pounds. She was a good needlewoman, but she never saved her hundred pounds. A neighbour would fall sick and need a holiday or a friend’s son would need a new suit to apply for a job, and she handed over the money with no fuss or remark, as if it were an ordinary thing to do. She got a lot of comfort from praying. Every night we all kneeled to pray in the living room before going to bed. There was nothing dramatic in these prayers. My father and mother clearly felt they were talking to a friend in the room with them. I never felt that, so I believed there was something wrong with me. Then the 1914 war started and I joined the army and heard a different kind of prayer. The clergy on all sides were praying for victory. They told us God wanted our government to win and was right there behind us, with the generals, shoving us forward. A lot of us in the trenches let God go at that time. But Duncan, all these airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky notions are nothing but aids to doing what we want anyway. My parents used Christianity to help them behave decently in a difficult life. Other folk used it to justify war and property. But Duncan, what men believe isn’t important−it’s our actions which make us right or wrong. So if a God can comfort you, adopt one. He won’t hurt you.”
“Will he not?” said Thaw sullenly. “The only God I can imagine is too like Stalin to be comforting.”
“I don’t condone Stalin’s methods, of course, but I firmly believe anyone else ruling Russia in the thirties would have had to behave like him.”
The new pills stopped working and the doctor prescribed others which didn’t work either. On the worst nights Mr. Thaw sat by the bed wiping trickles of sweat from Thaw’s face with a towel and holding out a basin to take the thick yellow phlegm. Thaw was wholly occupied by the disease now. He felt it in him like civil war sabotaging his breathing and allowing only enough oxygen to feel pain, helplessness and self-disgust. Once after midnight he said, “Doctor thinks … this illness … mental.”
“Aye, son. He’s hinted at it.”
“Fill bath.”
“What?”
“Fill bath. Cold water.”
With difficulty he explained that maybe (like a land forgetting inner differences when attacked by another) the clenched air tubes might relax if his whole skin was insulted by cold water.
Mr. Thaw reluctantly filled the bath and helped Thaw to the edge. Thaw dropped his pyjamas, placed one foot in the water and stood, breathing heavily. After a while he brought in the other foot and with a spasmodic effort knelt on one knee.
“Hurry up, Duncan. Put yourself under!” said Mr. Thaw and moved to thrust him down.
“No!” screamed Thaw, and five minutes later managed to lie on his back with nose and lips above the surface. Breathing was as hard as ever. Mr. Thaw dried him and helped him back to bed. “You should have lain down at once, Duncan. If shock treatment can work, it has to come as a shock.”
Thaw sat for a while, then said, “You’re right. Hit me.”
“What?”
“Hit me. On face.”
“Duncan! … I cannae.”
After more minutes of sore breathing, Thaw cried, “Please!”
“But Duncan—”
“Can’t stand … more this. Can’t stand.”
Mr. Thaw struck his face with his open palm.
“No good. Could hit … myself … harder. Again!”
Mr. Thaw struck harder. Thaw reeled, recovered, compared the painful cheek to the pain in his chest and muttered, “No bloody good,”
Mr. Thaw bowed his head and wept. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and Thaw embraced him, saying, “Sorry, Dad. Sorry.”
He felt his father’s body shake with the sobs erupting inside. It did not feel a large body, and looking down at the thin white hair strands on the freckled scalp he sensed it was an ageing body, and was puzzled to find his own, for a moment, the stronger.
“Go to bed, Dad,” he said. “I’m better now.”
The tension in his chest had eased.
“My God, Duncan, if I could take your damned illness myself I would! I would!”
“What good would that do? Who would support us then? No, this is the best arrangement.”
Mr. Thaw went to bed and the breathing worsened again. When he tried to ignore it by staring at things in the surrounding room they became unstable, as if walls, furniture and ornaments were pieces of a destructive force gripped into shape by a hostile force which could only just hold them. A glazed jug before the window seemed about to explode. Its shiny green hardness threatened him across the room. Everything he saw seemed made of panic. He stared at the ceiling and gathered his thoughts into an intense, silent cry: ‘You exist. I surrender. I believe. Help me please.’
The asthma worsened. He gave a fearful moan, then controlled himself enough to make an amused sound and say, “Nobody. There. At all.”
He said it again, louder, but it sounded like a lie. Without comfort he found himself condemned to a faith which would never again let him end a prayer by saying, ‘If you exist.’
Again he fired his thoughts through the ceiling.
‘This belief comes from my cowardice, not from your glory. You won it by a torturer’s trick. But you are far from winning my approval. And I will never, never, never, never pray to you again.’
Next day the doctor said, “This has gone on far too long. He should be in hospital. Have you a neighbour with a telephone?”
Ruth and his father helped him dress. The neighbours stood at their doors as the ambulance men carried him downstairs. Mrs. Gilchrist called out glumly, “A fine way to go your holidays, Duncan.”
It was a fresh July morning. He sat clutching the edge of the ambulance bench while Mr. Thaw on the bench opposite grunted and prized at the lock of a suitcase with a propelling pencil. Thaw said, “What’s wrong?”
“The bloody lock’s stuck.”
“I won’t need a case in hospital.”
“Of course you won’t. This is to take away your clothes.”
The frosted glass window was slightly open at the top and he watched the streets of Blackhill through the slit. The sun shone and children shouted. He said, “That was quick.”
“Yes,” said his father, putting the case down. “I can’t help feeling relieved. When Ruth and I are climbing in Zermatt we’ll know you’re being better cared for than you could be at home.”
“I don’t suppose I’ll be in long.”
“If I were you, Duncan, I wouldn’t be too anxious to get out. It might be wise to tell the doctor in charge that there’s nobody to look after you outside. Give them time to discover the fundamental root cause of the trouble.”
“It doesn’t have a fundamental root cause.”
“Don’t make up your mind about that. Modern hospitals have all kinds of resources, and S
tobhill is the biggest in Britain. I was in it myself in 1918: a shrapnel wound in the abdomen.
Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’ve plenty of books. I read a lot in Stobhill, authors I couldnae face now, Carlyle, Darwin, Marx…. Of course I was on my back for five months.” Mr. Thaw looked out of the window a while, then said, “There’s a railway cutting in the grounds which goes to a kind of underground station below the clock tower. The army sent us there in trains. Would you like me to bring you Lenin’s Introduction to Dialectical Materialism?”
“No.”
“That’s shortsighted of you, Duncan. Half the world is governed by that philosophy.”
The ward was so long that the professor and his company took over an hour to inspect the beds on one side and come down the other to where Thaw lay, near the door. The professor was robust and bald. He stood with folded arms and tilted head as if studying a corner of the ceiling. His quiet speech reached patient, staff doctor, sister, staff nurse and medical students equally, though a bright glance at one of them sometimes underlined a remark or question.
“Here we have a pronounced bronchial infection based on a chronic weakness which may be hereditary, since the father’s sister died of it…. You won’t die of it. Nobody dies of asthma unless they’ve a weak heart, and your ticker should keep you running another half century, with ordinary care. There may be a psychological factor—the illness first appeared at the age of six, when the family was split by war.”
“My mother was with us,” said Thaw defensively.
“But the father wasn’t. Note the eczema on scrotum and behind knee and elbow joints. Typical.”
“Has he had skin tests?” asked a student.
“Yes. He reacts violently to all pollens, all hair, fur, feather, meat, fish, milk and every kind of dust. So these can only be irritations. If they were causes he’d have spent his whole life in bed and he frequently gets by without asthma…. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Thaw.
“As to treatment: penicillin to reduce the infection, a course of aminophylline suppositories for long-term relief and isoprenaline for temporary relief. Physiotherapy to encourage breath control, that’s quite important if they’re young, and later a course of de-allergizing injections to cope with the irritation. Coal tar for the skin. It’s messy, it’s old-fashioned, but the best we can do till we get our hands on this new American cortisone cream. And a sedative to help him relax…. Are you a nervous type?”
“I don’t know,” said Thaw.
“Do you lose yourself in daydreams, then jump violently at ordinary noises?”
“Sometimes.”
The professor lifted a drawing of a winged woman from Thaw’s locker. “Artistic, too. Would you mind chatting to a psychiatrist?”
“No.”
“Good. I know you’re not bonkers, but a few talks about family, sex, money and so on can cut down feelings which might interfere with the more straightforward treatments. Your teeth need attention too. You don’t brush them often enough, do you?”
“No,” said Thaw.
The ward was murmurous with conversations which coalesced, once or twice a week, into political arguments in which lumps of language were hurled backward and forward across great distances. Sometimes in the morning a distant clanking drew near and a huge man toiled past, bowing low over a tiny complicated crutch. His face was shrunk to a bright animal eye, a lump of nose and a mouth twisted over toothless gums. He kept muttering, “God knows how I got this way.” “I’ve been a hard worker all my life.” “I’ve earned every penny I owned” and “I do nut like hospitals.”
The men in the beds on each side were more self-absorbed. On the left Mr. Clark frowned thoughtfully, moving his hands in slow descriptive gestures or lifting and letting fall the bedclothes in different folds. In the afternoon he made croaking sounds which the nurses interpreted as requests for a urine bottle, bedpan or cigarette; he was allowed to smoke if someone was there to see he didn’t burn himself. His face and neck were leathery and corded like a turtle’s, his nose high-bridged and imperious. Propped up by pillows he sometimes dozed, his head dithering in space a fraction away from them, then lurched awake with a faint cry of “Agnes!” Nobody visited him. Mr. McDade on Thaw’s left was a small man whose chest bulged like a fat stomach against his chin. He had wiry red hair and a severe face made clerkly by steel spectacles without lenses. These held up each nostril a rubber tube from an oxygen cylinder behind the bed. He removed them to sleep, and sometimes at night rose up in bed on all fours like a dog, making an orchestral noise as if forcing breath through hundreds of tiny flutes and whistles. The nurses would turn him over and restore the spectacles for a while. A small brisk wife and some very tall sons came to see him regularly and before visiting hour he was given an injection which let him talk knowledgeably about grandchildren and prizefighting in a low, clogged ably about grandchildren and prizefighting in a low, clogged voice. He and Thaw often exchanged a slight, negative heads-hake, and one day when his relatives were late he said, “Some business this, eh?”
“Aye.”
“A bad bugger, thon.”
“Who?”
“Clark.”
Thaw glanced the other way and saw Mr. Clark holding up the top edge of his sheet and studying it like a newspaper. Mr. McDade muttered, “Have you noticed? When the nurses have tucked him in he untucks himself and croaks for a bottle. Outside he’d get six months for it. Outside they call that indecent exposure.”
“He’s old.”
“Aye, he’s old. When old men reach that state there’s a place for them.”
Twice a week Thaw put on slippers and dressing gown and was pushed in a wheelchair to the psychiatric block, or walked there if he was well enough. The psychiatrist was a well-dressed man of about forty with no special characteristics. He said, “During our conversations you may experience several unexpected emotions toward me. Please don’t be ashamed to mention them, however bizarre they seem. I won’t be at all offended. They’ll be part of the treatment.”
Thaw talked about parents, childhood, work, sexual fantasies and Marjory. The words poured from him, and once or twice he burst into tears. The psychiatrist said, “In spite of your blinding resentment of women I suspect you are basically heterosexual,” and, later, “The truth, you know, isn’t black or white, it’s black and white. I keep a ceramic zebra on my mantelpiece to remind me of that,” but usually he said “Why?” or “Tell me more about that,” and Thaw felt no emotions toward him at all. He enjoyed the visits but returned to the ward feeling slightly anxious and flat, like an actor whose performance has been neither applauded nor booed. When able to walk he prolonged his return through the hospital grounds. The long low red-brick wards lay on the slopes of an airy hill. Seagulls were always circling overhead or perched on gables, perhaps because of stale bread flung out by the kitchens. There was a high red clock tower with a tinny chime, and all was gardened around with shrubberies, gravel paths and beds of bee-humming, dazzling, blue and scarlet flowers. It was a summer of extraordinary heat. Patients in dressing gowns walked carefully on the lawns or brooded on benches. Most of them were aging and solitary, and when white-clad nurses passed briskly in chattering couples and threes; Thaw was startled by the mercy of these bright young women caring for so many made lonely, feeble and repulsive by disease.
Each week his breathing improved for a few days, then worsened. Mr. Clark stopped smoking and calling for Agnes and lay perfectly still. The deep lines cut by experience were fading from his face; each day he was more like a young man though his eyes looked different ways and one side of his mouth opened in a grin while the other was firmly shut. Mr. McDade in the right-hand bed was aging. The hollows between the cords of his cheeks and neck grew deeper. He stared at passing doctors and nurses with unusually wide red-rimmed eyes. He spoke less to his wife and sons but often glanced toward Thaw, muttering, “Some … business … this … eh?”
He plainly wanted companions
hip in pain, but Thaw muttered “Aye” without looking up from scribbling. The notebook had become a neutral surface between the pain of the ward and the pain of breathing. He hated leaving it to feed or to sleep. At night, when a lamp shone on the nurses table far down the ward, enough gloaming filtered in from the summer sky to make a pale tablet of his page, and his hand continued shading enigmatic female heads, and grotesque male ones, and monsters that were part bird, part machinery, and huge cities mingling every style and century of architecture. After midnight he put the books aside and sat erect, clinging so tightly to consciousness that for many nights he thought himself sleepless. Then he noticed that though he heard the remote melancholy ding-dong of the clock tower sounding the quarters, they never seemed to sound the hour, and once he saw the two night nurses whispering near a corner bed, and then, without crossing the floor, one was reading a book at the central table and the other sat crocheting nearby. All night he was dipping in and out of sleep, but at such a shallow angle he never noticed. Sometimes he slept soundly and then waking was difficult, for it was hard at first to recognize the shapes and sounds of the ward and breathing was a vile science to be relearned by a lot of choking.
Late one night the nurse in charge led round a sister he had never seen before. They stopped at Mr. McDade’s bed. He was sleeping in the oxygen spectacles, his mouth continually gulping air and a sound like distant bagpipes coming from his chest. Below her stiff, white, sphinx-like cap the sister’s face looked keen and fiftyish. She said, “Poor McDade! God help him!” on a low note of such stern pity that warmth gushed in Thaw’s chest and he gazed at her lovingly. She moved to his bed-foot, smiled and said, “And how are you tonight, Duncan?”
He whispered, “Fine, thanks.”
“Would you like a cup of cocoa?”
“Very much, thanks.”
“You’ll see to it, nurse?”
Lanark Page 35
