After a brief hesitation he turned right, thinking that if he kept turning right he would eventually find himself near Mooncranker’s room again. Or, failing that, he could retrace his steps by turning left whenever presented with a choice. However, he was now faced with a double swing-door, and passing through that found himself in a small square hall, with the corridor continuing beyond it. Sitting on a chair against the wall was a sandy-haired man in an overcoat. His head had declined on to his breast and he did not look up as Farnaby entered. Thinking him asleep, Farnaby began cautiously to cross the hall, but the man looked up suddenly and nodded.
‘Uz numera?’ Farnaby said, in low tones, but the other made no reply, merely gazed blankly for a moment, then again lowered his head. Farnaby hesitated, wondering if he should ask about lavatories in some other language, but he decided against it. He proceeded across the hall and into the corridor again.
Some way down, he opened another unnumbered door, and looked appalled into a small shining kitchen. There must have been an inner room or recess invisible from the door, because immediately on his opening it and looking in, a clear female voice called out, ‘Kimse?’
Without pausing to think, Farnaby closed the door softly and walked hastily away down the corridor. Possessed by the fear that the woman he had disturbed might come to the door to look out, he took a turning to the right, another, shorter corridor with a glazed glass door at the far end. He felt a fugitive, a person being hunted through these corridors. The increasing urgency of his need to urinate became confused in his mind with guilt, with the need to escape detection. His heart was beating quickly. He thought he heard somewhere ahead of him a door closing. Dread of some unavoidable confrontation possessed him, of some person in white suddenly appearing before him in this pitiless corridor. A sense of all the persons, robed and veiled and masked, working in this labyrinth, appalled him; he was an interloper, a person without function here; moreover, he was lost and the lost are prey to those who know their bearings. He looked at his watch: five minutes past three in the morning. He thought briefly and sacrilegiously of pissing against the white wall. Then, when he felt he could bear no longer to go on down the corridor, he came to a narrow passage terminating in a dark door, not a white internal one, a door obviously communicating with the outside world. It was bolted at top and bottom, with heavy bolts which he eased back quietly, working with beating heart and tormented bladder, to effect a means of egress into the night.
He succeeded finally, stepping out into a sort of interior courtyard enclosed on all sides by hospital buildings. He took some paces forward and then proceeded to void his bladder, close up against the wall for secrecy and silence, a scaldingly blissful operation. Buttoning himself he looked up at the tall buildings rising on all sides. Most of the rooms were in darkness but here and there were lighted windows. He found it odd to think that in one of these rooms Mooncranker was lying being intravenously fed. If these rooms, all these hundreds of rooms, were regarded as cells, then each was infected with disease, impaired by some disability; yet the organism as a whole functioned well … Time to be getting back to Mooncranker, he thought. It had not occurred to him yet, except as a sort of vague forboding, that he had no exact idea where Mooncranker’s room was.
In returning to the door he heard a scuffling and a faint clatter from the darkness to one side. He stopped, peering into the darkness, and saw after a moment a double row of metal bins standing against a low wall. He had startled a cat from its scavenging and in its flight it had set one of the lids clattering against the bin next to it. He saw in the faint light thrown from a second-floor window the contents of this uncovered bin, which could not have been of much interest to a cat, being composed in its top layers at least of wads of cotton wool with dark discoloured patches that he did not examine or think about too closely. The waste products of the healing process.
As quickly as possible he retraced his steps, passed through the door again, bolted it behind him. The hush of the hospital settled round him. He stood there in the passage for some moments, breathing deeply. Then he cautiously emerged on to the corridor. He knew he had to turn left to begin with and then at the next junction right but after this he found himself at a loss. He walked down a corridor that seemed longer than any he had met on the way. From somewhere near he thought he heard the rattling of trolley wheels. His former apprehension began to return to him. Moreover he now realized that he had omitted to make a mental note of Mooncranker’s room-number. It was about two thirds of the way down. But from which end will I now be approaching it? The numbers of the rooms along Mooncranker’s corridor were in two figures. Seventies and eighties. Or perhaps thirties and forties. Why did I not take care? I didn’t expect of course to be wandering so far afield. That mistake over the linen closet first confused me. And then the voice from the kitchen, inquiring into my identity. I should have said strong boy. Kouvetli oglan.
He had not, as far as he could remember, gone up or down any stairs in his wanderings. So he must be still on the same floor as Mooncranker. He reached the end of the long corridor, passed again through double swings-doors, which made a faint susurration. Here there was a narrow hall with a number of doors set fairly close together. They had no numbers, but several had metal plates with names on them. Consulting rooms or offices of the staff, presumably. Beyond them, as a sort of narrower continuation, another corridor began. He set off along this corridor, noticing now that his fear of encounters had made him sweat – the shirt stuck to his back. These shiny white walls, along which the light from overhead strips seemed to melt and spread, this glazed beige rubberized substance beneath his feet, the smells of sweet suffocation that seemed part of the emission of light itself, these things had been accompaniments of his life always. He was made for upright progress through these labyrinthine arteries as if he were himself some dazed enzyme or protein, some humble mineral agent in the veins of the hospital …
Some instinct made him look back the way he had come. He saw very briefly, trembling on the brink of escaping sense, two nuns side by side, walking through the hall he had just left. He was able to see without being seen at this moment, because he was at right angles to them as they approached the hall and he saw them through the glass partition that separated the hall itself from a secondary passage which he had not noticed in passing. He did not know whether they had seen him but thought not, as neither made any sign. However, they had turned right into the hall: which meant, if they continued through it, that they would be emerging in a matter of moments on the corridor where he was at present standing. And then they would certainly see him. He had therefore a very short time in which to decide on a course of action. If he stayed where he was, the sisters would come upon him. They would see at once he was not a patient. Probably ignorant of the presence of Mooncranker, let alone attendant strong boys, they would think him an intruder. He would no doubt be able to reassure them but the thought of their initial impression, their first view of him as a loitering shirt-sleeved marauder, was intolerable to him, as if no subsequent explanation could ever efface it, and he decided, in that split second, on evasive action. The nearest door to him had number one hundred and twenty-five on it. Farnaby turned the knob gently, opened the door and slipped in, closing it behind him.
The room was in darkness. After a moment or two he was able to detect the deep regular breathing of a sleeper. Rather stertorous. Impossible to tell from it gender or number. He waited there with his back to the door, hardly daring to breathe for fear of arousing the occupant of the room. Even in these few moments he thought it strange, the knowledge thus effected of another human being, lying there in the darkness, perhaps gravely ill, oblivious of his presence. He waited for two or three minutes then a sort of rising panic obliged him to re-enter the corridor. He opened the door very slightly, looked up and down. The creature on the bed behind him stirred, murmured. Perhaps it was the light the open door admitted. Nobody in the corridor. Soundlessly Farnaby slipped out. He re
sumed his way along the corridor. No sign of the nuns now. No sound of any sort, except the scuffle of his own feet on the floor. Turning right at the next junction he entered a corridor that seemed familiar. The numbers on the doors were in two figures. Forty-three, forty-four … That red fire hydrant on the wall, surely I remember that. He walked about two-thirds of the way along this corridor, stopped, stared at the number, the white door, as if trying by some effort of the will to impose attributes that would make it indubitably Mooncranker’s. Then he took a deep breath, opened the door slightly and looked in. It was not Mooncranker’s room. There was only one bed in it and a man was sitting on a chair beside the bed. This man did not look up immediately and Farnaby was on the point of withdrawing, had in fact begun to turn in to the corridor again when he saw another door opening further down and realized that at any moment someone – some member of the hospital staff probably – would be emerging on to the corridor and would see him loitering at this door where he had no business to be. He was paralysed for the moment, with indecision, and in that moment the man on the chair looked over his shoulder and saw him. He said nothing, but Farnaby could see from his expression and the posture of his body that he was not startled or hostile. As if in a dream he closed the door and advanced towards the bed. And when he looked down at the man’s thin, quite ordinary face, he thought that face showed a dreamlike quality too. In the bed was a youth of perhaps nineteen with a flushed face. His eyes were closed. Farnaby knew at once that this youth was very ill. The man at the bedside caught his gaze and nodded. His face was calm and stricken. ‘C’est mon fils,’ he said.
Farnaby in this moment ceased to feel an intruder because he could see that this man was so filled with grief that nothing mattered, there was no room in his mind for questions of identity. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, apologizing for his presence there uninvited but also, more importantly, for the gravity of the boy’s condition.
‘He is dying,’ the man said. He looked down at the smooth, flushed face. ‘In some hours now, he will be dead.’
‘Are you sure?’ Farnaby said. The youth seemed sleeping merely. But there was no perceptible breath.
The man nodded and a livelier expression appeared on his face. The need to establish a fact caused him to lose some of that tranced grief. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The appendix is burst.’
‘Burst,’ Farnaby repeated.
‘He seemed to recover from the operation, but since this morning he is sinking. The doctor told me there is no hope, none at all. He will die, perhaps before the morning.’
‘I am very sorry,’ Farnaby said again.
‘I cannot understand it,’ the man said. He lifted the bed-clothes a little, and showed Farnaby the boy’s strong neck, broad shoulders. ‘He is not yet twenty years old,’ he said, and his face in saying this had again returned to the dream, where strong young men decline and die and others in shirt sleeves enter rooms not their own in the middle of the night. ‘He wants the nurse who changes the dressings. This is all he asks for. But she is not on duty now. She is the day nurse. An hour ago he opened his eyes and asked for her. Not his mother, not his sister. Only the nurse who was changing the dressings every time, in the days we all thought he was going to get well. She will not be here before the morning.’
‘Any nurse would do,’ Farnaby said. ‘He would not notice the difference now, I think.’
Oh, yes. I think he would. There has been a relationship between them. She is young, you see, the same age as my son.’ ‘Yes, I see,’ Farnaby said.
‘They get an idea into their heads, you see.’
‘Yes. Well, if you will excuse me – ’ He looked down for the last time at the young man’s face, which was turned aside on the pillow. There was no mark of pain or suffering on it, only a deep flush round the cheek bones. The eyes were closed, the rather short lashes quite motionless. Farnaby wondered what colour the boy’s eyes were. He smiled a little at the seated man, trying in the smile to convey his sympathy. He began to move away from the bed.
‘Une seconde,’ the man said, and he got up from his seat. ‘I will go and see if I can find out when that nurse comes on duty tomorrow. Perhaps I can make him live through the night if I can promise him the nurse in the morning. Perhaps they can get her to come early.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Will you stay with him for a few minutes until I return?’ The man’s face had become eager momentarily at the prospect of action. ‘Si vous n’êtes pas pressés,’he said.
‘Of course.’
Almost as soon as the man had left the room, the boy’s eyes opened and he began to speak. ‘Doucement, Mathilde,’ he said. ‘Mathilde, be careful.’ His eyes, blue and wondering, looked at something beyond the bed. He swallowed thickly. His strong white throat worked painfully. ‘Qu’est ce que tu fais?’ he said. ‘What are you doing? His breath caught suddenly and noisily, then was released in a gasping pant. ‘Oui, comme ça,’ he said more loudly. ‘Yes, yes, like that. Aah …’ he sighed, on a long note of easement and relief, and Farnaby realized that in his delirium the youth was re-enacting the changing of his dressing by the nurse Mathilde, the painful removal of the plaster probably, and something else, some other ritual solace that had accompanied the change of dressing, something else Mathilde did for him … With a sudden compassionate insight, Farnaby saw through to the core of the dying boy’s delirium, and understood. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the dew of fever from the boy’s brow. His own eyes filled suddenly with tears as he did so, and it was through tears that he saw the boy’s father return.
‘They have asked for her,’ the man said. ‘She is coming in one hour.’ He turned to the bed and his face lost expression.
Farnaby muttered something, made his escape. Outside, in the corridor, his problem was waiting to be resumed. After brief consideration he decided that he should perhaps have taken the other direction, turned left instead of right at the last intersection of corridors. Accordingly he retraced his steps, past the fire hydrant again, along the other side. He did not know, so confused had he become, which side of the corridor Mooncranker’s room was likely to be, so he adopted a different technique, opening doors only very slightly, a mere crack, and peering in. Several doors he opened in this way upon darkness, one a large ward with rows of beds on either side, a dim night light at the far end. It could not be this corridor at all then. Try another one just to make sure. He chose an unnumbered door, opened it very very slightly, taking care to avoid the slightest noise. When the crack was wide enough, he applied his eye to it. As he did so he thought he heard, from some distant part of the hospital the sound of a human shriek. He listened, but the sound was not repeated. There was, however, a sort of regularly repeated gasping or low grunting sound from the room into which he was peering, and it was this that caused him to linger there, though he knew at once it was not Mooncranker’s room, but obviously an office of some kind. The light was too dim to make out things in any detail. Most of the space he could see was occupied by what looked like a large filing cabinet. He inched the door open wider, enlarged his field of vision, and saw two human figures apparently naked, rhythmically copulating in the dimness on a low article of furniture, presumably a table. The gasping sound was coming from one of them. He could not distinguish male from female, but one narrowbacked creature was kneeling between the legs of the other and moving back and forth with a sort of insensate regularity. The other was lying back on the table, face raised towards the ceiling, open-mouthed.
No way of telling whether it was doctors or nurses or patients thus whiling away the night. The face of the supine one bore a general resemblance in configuration to that of the lady doctor who had examined Mooncranker …
Suddenly Farnaby thought he heard steps behind him along the corridor, and the faint rattle of a trolley. He closed the door with immense care on the labouring back and open-mouthed face, then made off quickly along the corridor, coming after some moments to swing-doors he felt sure he remembered, and th
rough them into a square hall where against the wall, hunched forward in solitary meditation, sat the sandy-haired man in the overcoat, who looked up at his entrance and amicably grimaced.
‘Excuse me,’ Farnaby said, in his light, diffident voice. ‘Are you English by any chance?’
‘No’ exactly,’ the man said. ‘I’m frae Aberdeen.’
Farnaby exclaimed, ‘Oh a Scot!’ with sudden exuberance, as though he were applauding a boundary. He was delighted to find this reliable person in such a place. That accent stood for common sense and a decent reticence the world over; and the appearance of the man before him, sandy hair, high colour, keen blue eyes – though bloodshot now, he noticed, and rather strangely lingering in regard – all proclaimed the practical no-nonsense person, both feet planted squarely on the ground, attributes deeply reassuring, after his recent experiences, to Farnaby, who now announced his name.
‘Andrew McSpavine,’ the other returned promptly. ‘Will ye no hae a seat, laddie?’
‘Thanks.’ Farnaby sat down. ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit lost,’ he said, attempting a rueful smile.
‘Ay, that happens frequently, frequently,’ McSpavine said.
Farnaby, after waiting a moment in the hope of some help, said, ‘I think I know the way now, actually.’
There was silence between them for a few moments, then McSpavine sniffed loudly, clearing his nostrils of some blockage. ‘I hae sailed the seven seas, laddie,’ he said.
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