by Amy Witting
When the doctor had departed, Val said, ‘He was really nice about it, you see,’ but her tone was defiant and her expression uncertain.
‘Yes,’ lied Isobel.
*
It was Lance who put a stop to the unofficial visits of Doctor Wang. Lance had acquired a set of joke teeth, which fitted over his front teeth and projected like Dracula fangs over his lower lip. With fangs projecting and a thumb dragging at the outer corner of each eye to convert it to a sinister slit, he put his head in at the doorway shrilling, ‘Me Wun Bung Lung.’
Doctor Wang got up from his seat at Isobel’s bedside and walked out through the inner door into the corridor.
Isobel spoke in fury.
‘You disgusting little beast. You ever work a trick like that one again and you will not step into this room ever again. I shall never have another word to say to you.’
‘I didn’t know he was there.’
Lance didn’t tell lies as a rule. He did not see the need. That he was prepared to lie on this occasion was a hopeful sign.
‘That makes no difference. It was disgusting behaviour and it would be disgusting whether he saw it or not. You’ve no right to come here disgusting us.’
Lance wrenched the joke teeth out of his mouth and said sulkily, ‘It was a joke.’
‘Then keep your jokes for those who share your sense of humour.’
Val sprang a surprise.
‘How do you like it when people make jokes about Jews?’
Lance stood transfixed.
‘You never told me you were Jewish!’ Astonishment had replaced anger in Isobel’s voice. ‘But then why would you? That’s got nothing to do with the price of fish, I suppose.’
Lance said bitterly, ‘Some people know without being told.’
‘The way they know that Doctor Wang is Chinese? Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. There weren’t any prejudices around here until you started it. You should be proud of being Jewish, anyhow. I often wondered where you got your brains from. Not that you make much use of them. Get back to bed. Just go hide your face. We’ve had enough of you.’
Lance shuffled away, resentful but shaken.
Isobel said to Val, ‘Who told you he was Jewish?’
‘Nobody told me. You just have to look at him. You don’t notice much, do you?’
Val was smug, Isobel reflective.
Doctor Wang did not visit in Room 2 again.
Next morning he joined Isobel on the verandah, pulling up a vacant chair to sit beside her.
‘Lance seems to think I am physically repulsive.’
His voice was tremulous with hurt and offence.
‘Lance is repulsive. He got such a roasting that he actually stayed in bed all day. I think he figured that it was the only safe place for him.’
Doctor Wang refused to smile.
How vulnerable he was and how young! Hardly older than herself.
‘He’s only a pathetic little larrikin, you know. And you don’t have to take notice of him. And believe me, if Chinese people are slit-eyed and fang-toothed, then you must be a notable exception to the rule. You are a very good-looking young man. That is, according to Western standards. I don’t know how you rate in Hong Kong.’
Indeed, the only details of his appearance that might offend the Western eye could also be considered beauties: a sprite-like cast of countenance which would prevent his ever looking mature and a redness of lip which combined with the honey colour of his skin gave a disagreeable hint of the epicene quite alien to his character.
Fearing that sympathy had led her into impropriety, she added in haste, ‘Is your wife a beauty?’
‘I think so.’ His face lightened. ‘And my son is particularly handsome. For his age.’
Little Wang was six months old. The doctor’s joy in him transformed his face.
‘Look,’ she said urgently, ‘I know Lance is a blight. But look at his situation. He doesn’t seem to have anyone to care about him or think about his future. He honestly is very bright and responsive if you can get to him. I’ve tried to get him reading. I gave him The Old Man and the Sea. And he loved it.’
Lance had brought the book back woebegone.
‘Ah, kid, dem bloody sharks! I was with him all the way! Poor old bugger!’
Just the sort of response that Hemingway would have liked.
Doctor Wang had ceased to listen.
‘I should like you to read this poem aloud if you don’t mind. I cannot really appreciate the metre until I hear it.’
The literary talk was transferred to the verandah, where it drew others to listen.
Boris came first, ready to be of service.
Surprisingly, Eily drifted close, said, ‘Any charge for admission?’, drew up a chair and attended in silence.
Isobel looked up once to find an audience of six listening while she read aloud Byron’s ‘When we two parted / In silence and tears…’ It was quite like the ideal of life in a sanatorium, inviting the soul.
Quickly, it became a settled arrangement. If Doctor Wang was busy, he came to apologise, briefly, before he went about his duties.
The weather was good that spring. Mornington lay below a ridge, sheltered from the wind. There were few rainy days; on those rare occasions, Wang did not appear. Isobel missed the poetry hour intensely.
She wanted to write. The urge to write was beginning to torment her. She thought she might take advantage of the rainy mornings, when Val went down to talk to Gladys, but solitude never lasted long.
Rain or shine, Isobel had her own visitors.
There was Madeleine, a small, neatly made woman who told the serial story of her strange, episodic marriage to the handsomest taxi driver in Haberfield.
‘That’s what he used to say, love. Look at himself in the glass when he was shaving and say, “Who’s the handsomest taxi driver in Haberfield, Maddy?”’
‘Not a wide field.’
‘No, there wasn’t that much competition. But you see, love, he is always looking for a woman who sees what he sees in the glass.’
‘And it never lasts?’
Maddy shook her head sadly.
‘Never. I wish to heaven it did, so he could settle. Last time he left, he told me he’d only come back out of pity. I said to him, “Keep your pity for yourself, mate. You’re the one who needs it.”’
‘Would you really take him back again?’
The taxi driver had written her an affectionate letter, asking after her health. Madeleine shrugged. The gesture seemed to say, without enthusiasm, ‘What else is there?’
The taxi driver had been the study of Madeleine’s life, the only story she had to tell.
There was Peter, who worked in the laboratory with Ron, lived in one of the chalets, which were Isobel’s dream, did tapestry and longed for love.
He would set out for Sydney at the weekend, expecting that the skies would open and send him a lover, coming back on Sunday night dejected and needing comfort.
This was mysterious, since Peter was a personable young man, somewhat slight in figure and slightly feminine, though not effeminate, in face.
He blamed the sanatorium for his lack of success in courtship.
‘As soon as I say where I work, they start running.’
It was a dilemma.
He would not take up with a wog. Never. Yet he could not summon up courage to leave his job, his chalet, his security.
Isobel never had the courage, or the brutality, to ask him if he were one of us.
She could not use the word ‘wog’. Doctor Wang had in a rare assumption of authority banned it.
‘You will not use that word again, please. It is not necessary to out-Roman the Romans.’
Isobel grinned, guiltily, and complied.
There was Tamara, who did not visit formally, but lingered after she had made the beds to relive her spectacular life story of forced labour and bombings in Berlin, and of her passion for her son, Georgy, not her husband’s child, the fruit
of an earlier marriage or encounter.
Her great drama had been the struggle with the baby-sitter who had tried to rob her of Georgy.
‘She say, “You young. You young! You have more children!” And my Georgy, he grow up, think mother is bish go leave him.’ Tamara shook her head in fury, facing the kidnapper again. ‘I pull, she pull, she pull my hair, I kick her shins, grab my Georgy and run. Left his good coat.’ She frowned at this memory.
Tamara was the one narrator whose story Isobel truly enjoyed.
Tragic, comic, tough or tedious, she relived it with a gusto which raised the spirits of the listener.
Privacy was hard to find. Sometimes she felt that she was being eaten alive in very small mouthfuls.
*
‘Sometimes,’ said Val to Geoff and Pauline, ‘I think Isobel is out of her head. The muttering and the mumbling she goes on with!’ Her monotonous, mosquito voice rose to a high whine. ‘It’s enough to drive me crazy. You would think she might have a little consideration for other people.’
Geoff and Pauline, as usual the unwilling medium of Val’s resentment, were sealed in a moment of embarrassment, unable to speak.
Isobel could not speak either.
What Val said was true.
It was the unwritten poem to Robbie that was escaping from her control like a live animal.
She had decided that her best approach to that moment with Robbie was in a monologue in the style of Browning’s ‘Men and Women’.
That token of love which you offered me—it
was, I recall, a meat pie
offered with such words as might have turned it
to larks’ tongues
but for the poison I brought…
‘Larks’ tongues’ and ‘poison’, that was all right.
The difficulty was with the look of love, the light of love in his eyes, which she had killed and must now give life to…it had to be an insect which stung and died.
Oh, do not take offence if I say ‘insect’
I know that the word has unfortunate
connotations—
but think of the dragonfly, think of…
The trouble was that the only insects durable enough to destroy monsters were more in the nature of dung beetles or white ants, which did not in any case sting and die.
She had been so happily engrossed in her thoughts that she had no idea she was murmuring them aloud until Val had said sharply, ‘What on earth are you talking about? Dung beetles! I don’t believe you know what you are talking about yourself half the time.’
Isobel too had been shocked.
It had seemed so clear cut, if not easy. Keep to the rules, do what they tell you and you’ll get better. But what was the point of a healthy body if the mind couldn’t keep up with it?
Poor Val. First a foreigner and now a madwoman and no use complaining about a madwoman who consorted with doctors.
Isobel had said, ‘I’m sorry.’
It was no use resolving to renounce poetry. It would not go away.
She must somehow find the opportunity to write. Not a novel, of course, but a poem. One poem wouldn’t wreck her health; it might save her reason.
The only available sanctuary was the bathroom. It was in use from six o’clock till ten, closed for cleaning until eleven and out of bounds, therefore empty and unvisited, for the rest of the day. Once when she was waiting for the lavatory to be vacated, she had stepped in there and enjoyed a moment of peace and silence. She had not done that again, finding the contrast with her living conditions too painful, but now she thought of it as escape.
She would have to take care. Discovery would be too humiliating; she could not expect Val to cover for her.
She would have to vary the times of her escape and limit the period of absence, say to ten minutes. If Sister Connor or anyone else came looking for her, she could always explain away an absence of ten minutes. Nobody would enquire too closely into what might still be a prolonged trip to the lavatory. They wouldn’t have a clock on her after all.
The next time Val was out of the room, she hid her notebook and her pencil in the deep pocket of her dragon coat.
She was behaving like a school child planning a prank, but after all that was her exact situation at the moment.
So she became a rule breaker, one of the naughty ones, the smokers, the jokers, the truants.
To be caught would be calamitous, humiliating to her and also embarrassing to Wang. The risk made her nervous as well as cautious, but she could not give up those interludes of quiet, when she sat on the stool beside the bathtub and wrote, creating her mythical insect, the small bright-winged David which slew the monster madness as it died.
She had to ponder, too, a link between the meat pie and the love-light she embodied in the dragon-slaying insect.
Breath and light, both died…
She was so absorbed that she forgot to watch the time. On her third excursion, she looked at her watch and saw, with real fear, that she had been away from her bed for twenty-five minutes.
She put her notebook and her pencil in her pocket and made haste back to the room, trying not to look furtive. ‘Where have you been?’ asked Val.
‘Oh, just about the place.’ She added, trying in vain to seem casual, ‘Has anyone been looking for me?’
No. She had got away with it.
‘You’re getting to be as bad as Lance.’
Isobel had an answer from Tom Fenwick: a parcel with two back issues of Seminal and two copies of the New Yorker and a note that read: ‘What rotten luck. Shall keep up the reading matter. Please keep in touch and report progress. If I can help in any way, let me know. I mean PLEASE. T. F.’
It would be no trouble to respond to that one. She felt she was entitled to the services of people like Tom Fenwick. She had only to deserve them, an obligation she could not in any case avoid.
On the verandah a stranger appeared and approached the poetry-reading circle. A tall woman of imposing figure, silver hair plaited and coiled in a coronet around her well-poised head, approached them with small, slow steps.
Doctor Wang got quickly to his feet, crying, ‘Mrs Soames! Elsa! You should not be walking, surely.’
He pushed his chair forward. The lady sat, with dignity, settling the skirts of her splendid gown of royal blue velvet in graceful folds.
‘I took it slowly, doctor. I have come to no harm.’
Her voice was threadlike, but clear. Her serenity withstood reproach.
‘You must not walk back again.’ He looked to Boris, who nodded cheerfully.
‘I shall fetch a chair. I am becoming a very good driver.’
‘Thank you.’
Mrs Soames nodded to Boris.
‘We are having a poetry session,’ said Doctor Wang.
‘So I heard. That is why I have come to hear for myself.’
‘You must not come again, I am afraid. It simply won’t do. Mrs Soames is recovering after a thoracoplasty,’ he explained.
All those present looked with awe at Mrs Soames.
‘But may I stay now that I am here?’
Doctor Wang sighed and yielded.
‘Isobel and I are having an argument which perhaps you can settle. She had read a love poem of John Donne which I refuse to call a love poem. Isobel?’
Isobel read:
Oh, do not die, for I shall hate
All women so, when thou art gone,
That thee I shall not celebrate
When I remember thou wast one.
Mrs Soames nodded to interrupt her.
‘I know the poem.’
‘My objection to the term “love poem” is that one believes more in the poet’s pleasure in the brilliance of his paradoxes than in the sincerity of his passion.’
‘Say “joy”, not “pleasure”,’ said Isobel, ‘and I’ll concede the point. But why should his joy in his power of expression detract from his love?’
‘Love is self-forgetfulness, not self-expression,’ s
aid Wang.
Mrs Soames recited in her whispering voice:
How did the party go in Portman Square?
I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.
And how did Lady Gaster’s party go?
Juliet was next to me and I do not know.
‘Now that,’ said Wang, ‘I consider a truly Oriental love poem. Who is the poet?’
‘Hilaire Belloc.’
‘Hey,’ said Eily. ‘That’s neat. I like that.’
Doctor Wang was amused.
‘Are you taking to poetry, Eily?
‘Beats some of the stuff you hear around here.’
‘Well,’ said Isobel, ‘it’s just as clever as Donne. Only sneakier.’
‘We are back to our old argument. The art is to conceal art. Though I admit you have converted me to Hopkins. There is a difficulty there worth the struggle. Love is a simpler subject.’
‘In art but not in life,’ said Mrs Soames.
‘That is the last word, I think. And now you must go back. And you must not do this again. We shall wait for your promotion, to join us.’
Boris had left them, unobtrusively, and was now returning, pushing a wheelchair. He and the doctor together raised Mrs Soames from her chair and settled her in the wheelchair. Boris propelled her away, through Room 2 to the inner corridor. Isobel had always found trips by wheelchair humiliating; Mrs Soames managed to give this one the appearance of a royal progress.
She looked to Wang for further information about the visitor. He, however, was leaving them as well. He had been gazing with a troubled face after Mrs Soames.
On the verandah, Lance walked past the poetry group, unseeing, wrapped in grievance. The mental gymnastics by which he had transformed himself into an innocent victim were beyond imagination—but, as Isobel had to remind herself, he was in all things the victim of fate.
She was relieved when after two days he resumed his illegal visits to Room 2, though they restricted her own freedom, making it more difficult to escape to the bathroom.
There was a change in him. Though he perched as usual on the end of her bed and resisted as usual her attempts to get him to go back to bed, he was silent, apparently sunk in thought, but observing her with an attention which made her uneasy.
