The Convalescent Read online

“Thank you.”

  “A pleasure.”

  “Now you mustn’t feel,” Sheila resumed, taking the baby from her breast, grimacing slightly, “that you’re walking out on the job. There’s no job to walk out on. Really there isn’t. George knows it too. It’s no skin off his back. Anyway, you’re not a caretaker.”

  “No.”

  “That was kind of you,” she said, musing. “The whisky.”

  February 4th, 1979

  It would have surprised me, I think, had I been told that I would actually have an affair with Jennifer. But when it happened I wasn’t surprised. I seemed to have been waiting for it. On the face of it, it is an irresponsible and dangerous thing to do. It jeopardises my marriage; it might even be said that it jeopardises my job. How to explain it then? Well, I might start by saying that I’ve always wondered (I who have neither) at the coolness and ingenuity of those who have affairs. Where to meet, when to meet, how to meet, how to lie. How to lie: that is the most taxing part. I’m not at ease with my lies, though I have confidence in them. They work, they are effective, but with each one told – I sometimes fear – I undo a little more of myself. Not that I have to tell many, for it has always been my habit to work late two or three nights a week. Now, instead of working late, I go back to Jennifer’s flat. She lives nearby and it is simple. How could Margo find out? There are no lines to the office after five and should she pass and see the lights out I could say that I was on my way home.

  Why has it happened, though? Am I not still in love with my wife, still fascinated by her, still awed by her family? I am, and I must say that the more I am unfaithful to her the more she fascinates me. She is so much more complex and sophisticated than Jennifer, so much more highly charged, so much more difficult to satisfy, and I don’t just mean sexually. A crude way of putting it would be to say that Jennifer is a holiday from Margo. Or a trial run for Margo. That is sometimes what I feel. I can make love to Jennifer without the sense that her being is a labyrinth, significant parts of which I haven’t had the imagination to enter. Almost always with Margo the parts I’ve failed to reach are the parts which apparently on that day in that month ought to have been reached. She never says so – she’s too considerate for that – but I feel it. I lie back with a deep sense of having failed her, of having lost my way in the foothills, fallen to my knees. True, I have sometimes thought that it is because she is my wife that I feel this – that I would feel it with anyone who was my wife. A reflection on marriage, that’s to say, its way of waterlogging relationships with vows, duties, obligations, rather than on Margo? It’s a theory; but I’m less and less convinced by it. I think that Margo will always be too much for me. Even in old age, with her belief that the days should be intelligently ordered (over the breakfast table, all options are reviewed), she will daunt me. She thinks, you see, that I have the makings of a lazy man. She says that if I don’t watch out I will become slack, then slacker, then unable to make any kind of impression at all. I’m troubled by this view, naturally, even though I don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve it. I’ve always worked hard at my present job and she knows that I’m held in high esteem there.

  Well, I’m not working quite as hard or effectively as I used to. It’s not just that the time which I previously spent catching up, getting ahead, briefing myself, I now spend with Jennifer. It’s that even during office hours I’m not as decisive as I was. I hesitate more. (My double life interfering with the springs of action? The man I am with Jennifer and the man I am with Margo at odds, creating a kind of stutter in my approach to things?) One evening, as though trying to clear my head, recover my singularity, I worked late again, but the thought of Jennifer just round the corner was too much for me and after about an hour I gave up. The result is that I’m always slightly behind now. My boss, Geoffrey Archibald, realises it and no longer relies on me for instant information. I joke that it is premature middle age, but since he is distinctly middle-aged and I am not this doesn’t go down well. (His face has a shrunken look, as if he has long lived in expectation of being hurt, and his shoulders are hunched, as if this expectation has included a fear of actual physical hurt.) I repeat my joke, however, in one form or another, because I couldn’t possibly give the real reason. “Mr Archibald, Geoffrey, Jennifer and I are having an affair …” “Working together, close colleagues for some time, Jennifer and I have become involved. You know how it is.” Unthinkable. There can be no playing about with the immemorial sanctities where Geoffrey is concerned. A Protestant right down the line. Clean fingernails and tired hair.

  I don’t think though that I’m more involved with Jennifer than I was when we were simply friends. Sex has not uncovered new emotions, I’m afraid, nor intensified old ones. She senses this and doesn’t like it, for it is not so with her. Each week her hopes and expectations increase, and there are times when this makes her as difficult in her way as Margo. A few times I’ve even found Margo a relief by comparison. She is so fiercely verbal, my wife, always aware of what is troubling her, always alive with explanations. Explanations! She is at her most intense when she cannot choose between two or three rival ones. Until she decides she is terribly restless. Then she will tell me why x or y is the most satisfactory one, the most imaginative. These moments of triumphant choice are usually marked by strong sexual desire: it is as if she enjoys a rush of energy each time she understands something and, generous as she is, seeks to share it even with one who may not quite have grasped the original dilemma, never mind its solution.

  Jennifer by contrast tends to be listless in the face of her problems. She allows them to silence her. I have to provoke her into admitting them, and even then she does so in a way that exasperates me. It’s as though she can’t quite bring herself to accept that they are hers; as though they are problems which have been assigned to her by mistake, as a debt meant for Smith might be incorrectly assigned to Brown. I venture to explain her to herself, for which she thanks me, though she doesn’t like the fatherly tone I apparently adopt at these times. In truth my tone is Margo’s: not its vitality, perhaps, but its directness. The irony of this doesn’t escape me. Inspired by my wife’s intelligence to try and explain my mistress to herself! Am I that helpless? In the pub before I go home – the neutral ground between Jennifer’s flat and my own that can strike me as preferable to either – I look into my whisky and wish I could feel that there was a significant and enduring “I” in all this.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Montgomery Nursing Home, like so many homes for the elderly, had originally been a country house. Next it had been a hotel, then a mental home, before finally, ten years ago, acquiring its present character. The matron then was the matron still, Alice Macrae (known to her staff as “the moth”, on account of her way of appearing, soundlessly and immediately, at any crisis). She took in a maximum of thirty patients, charged a hundred and ten pounds a week, and as well as insisting that the elderly be continent and ambulant if they were to be admitted, she let it be known (“we don’t have an intensive care unit here, you know”) that she wouldn’t put up with them indefinitely if they ceased to be so. (This may have been why, once a week, a keep-fit class of sorts took place in the home. Mournful occasions. Limbs without memory of suppleness or vigour. Wretched grins.) At the time William came to be employed there, there were twenty-five women and five men – about the average ratio. Married couples were sometimes admitted, but it wasn’t something matron was keen on, believing as she did that the married thought they had more rights than the unmarried.

  The full-time staff usually chose to stay in the Montgomery, for it was thirty miles at least from the nearest town. Their quarters – matron had a cottage in the grounds – were in the west wing. There were three assistants, called nurses by the old folk but actually untrained, a cook, an odd-jobs man, and some occasional helpers. That was all. The local minister, a close friend of matron’s, was a regular visitor, handling the Montgomery’s accounts, but at pains to point out that his province was re
ally elsewhere. Each afternoon and suppertime, however, he and matron could be seen walking in the grounds – under a golf umbrella if the weather was bad. (Mealtimes matron left to her assistants: they weren’t exposed to complaints about the food, or, if they were, they didn’t think that anything was to be gained by passing them on.) Sometimes he held a service. And sometimes he stayed the night.

  It was by matron and the minister that William was interviewed. A bright autumn evening, the minister’s light blue pipe smoke drifting in the rays of the setting sun, matron sitting forwards at her desk in her uniform, hands clasped. Their questions were casual, their tone condescending, but their need for a replacement for the last odd-jobs man – he had left one Saturday night and never returned – was clear. William had been well briefed by Sheila: he said he could drive, cook, garden, light fires, do carpentry, mend fuses. About his past she had advised him to be vague. Would anyone who simply wanted an odd-jobs man be particularly interested in his past anyway? He doubted it. Even on good days it came to him obscurely. It was as if, so long a source of shame to him, it had taken to presenting itself in riddles. (Not even dreams of it could have been stranger.) Incidents came to him either stripped of their contexts; or with contexts which rendered them peculiar; or in sequences which made little sense. And his mistakes, his failures: they too had lost their individuality, appearing to be manifestations now of the one essential failure, whose character, he sometimes feared, would always elude him.

  The Reverend Walsh, however, was an inquisitive man, red-faced and overweight, his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest, like the rhythm of curiosity itself (his nose for weaknesses, indeed, might have been the main reason he was present). His pipe, as though an aid to enquiry, he held while speaking just to the right of his mouth, and his voice was deep, an actor’s or an orator’s voice. It had the effect, after some moments, of making William feel that here was a man practised at appearing taxed by ultimate questions, taken over by them, made sleepless by them. Before speaking, and often mid-speech too, he rolled his eyes a little, which made his words (a mixture of the colloquial and the high-flown) seem more carefully chosen and ambiguous than they were. William, unused to company, was watchful, fearing interrogation. Might they (these strangers with leisure) hunt him after all where he was least able to bear it – in his past? Oblige him to scour it, be precise? (The Weirs, gracious and forbearing, had spoiled him.) He bowed his head, waiting for the minister to finish.

  “So if I may say so, Mr Templeton, you seem to be a man of some culture. I know these are times of bad unemployment, but how do you come to be applying for a job like this?”

  “I had a job on a farm, as a caretaker. The possibilities seemed limited, particularly with the winter coming on.”

  “Sure, sure. But how did you come to be doing that job? It was presumably not a lifelong ambition, not a …”

  “No,” William said, remembering his line with Captain Jenkins and Lieutenant Jackson. “I had reached a stage in my life where I wanted to do some writing. It seemed to me that such a job was ideal for that.”

  “That job, yes,” the minister said, “but this one? What makes you think you’ll have much time to write here? You’ll be kept at it, let me assure you. You may even have to do a little nursing.”

  “One shouldn’t be too isolated,” William responded, roused by the minister’s pugnacity. “I had no community. All I had were the fields and … tracks, traces … Also, I’ve always been affected by the elderly. Or, to be more honest, by the fact that I know less about them than I should.”

  “What if you find that you don’t like them?” matron asked, smiling. “It wouldn’t be unknown.”

  “I don’t think I’ll find that,” William said. “I’d regard it as a failure, as …”

  “…unchristian?” the minister asked, taking up matron’s smile.

  “We will grow old ourselves,” William said. “What then?”

  “Are your parents still alive?” matron asked.

  “No. Both dead.”

  “Could I ask you,” the minister pressed, “if you had to nurse them at the end? Had you to show yourself patient and faithful before their varying and difficult demands? Before God also, of course?”

  Matron looked at him as if she feared that she was about to lose his drift. (Even she, his intimate.) She had curly silver hair which now and then – a gesture of excitement – she would fastidiously ruffle. She did it now, and it might almost have been the minister’s words or voice – though in no obvious way – that had excited her.

  “No, I didn’t nurse either of them. My father died in hospital, and my mother came to an unfortunate end.”

  “For some, of course, death is an unfortunate end however it occurs,” the minister said. “Was your mother’s end …”

  “She was murdered,” William said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. How hard are some of our trials. How hard.”

  “Yes,” William said, looking at him closely, wondering if his lack of surprise was genuine or affected, “you could say so.”

  “As far as I know, the murderer hasn’t been found,” he continued. Would he here, before strangers, in this home for the elderly, be overcome? He would stick to the bare facts: the bare facts consoled. “And probably never will be. Apparently there were no motives. Case just about closed, I’d imagine.”

  “I am sad to hear it,” matron said. “Such a violent world. Was she old?”

  “I never thought of her as old. Late sixties.”

  “She’d have been a youngster here,” matron said, brightening. “Most of our patients are over eighty. What would you say the average was, Alan?”

  “Eighty-two,” the minister replied, as if it was just one of many figures he had at his fingertips.

  “How is the old lady who walked over to the farm?”

  William asked. “She seemed a vigorous eighty.”

  “She was. But she died shortly after that. It’s often the way, isn’t it, Alan?”

  “Yes, you often find it, Mr Templeton,” the minister said. “There’s an extreme gesture of some kind – a bid for freedom, an outburst, an assault even. Then death. Death. Funny.”

  “An assault?” William asked.

  “Yes. Assault and die seems to be the impulse.”

  There was a silence. William had the impression that the minister and matron wanted to look at each other, but were refraining, out of politeness. He could tell nothing from their manner. Had he acquitted himself well or badly? Struck them as erratic or trustworthy? Were they prepared to set aside any such misgivings because of their need for an odd-jobs man? An odd-jobs man. To pass the time while they deliberated – silently, looking in opposite directions, as if they were summing up a house they’d just been shown round – he played about with his title. Odd. Jobs. An odd man. Jobs for the odd. Jobs. Odd. Time gathered about the words and was treasured. The silence deepened.

  At last matron looked up.

  “We’re pleased to offer you the post, Mr Templeton,” she said, ruffling her hair. “Start whenever you want. There’s a room for you in the west wing. Don’t worry: you’ll slowly pick up what’s required.”

  She stood up and shook his hand. Suddenly jovial, the minister did so too, pressing his left hand on top of their two clasped right ones, a gesture which, neither caution nor benediction, struck William as almost meaningless. Ecclesiastical good form, he supposed, nothing more. His smile wary, he struggled to say something appropriate.

  “A sherry, Alice?” the minister suggested.

  “Will you join us, Mr Templeton?” matron asked.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not. I don’t drink. But don’t let me …”

  “Quite right,” the minister said, first leaning with his left hand on matron’s desk, then, with his right, opening a drawer halfway down the side of the desk and taking out a bottle of sherry. “Sure I can’t tempt you?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll show you round,�
�� matron said, sipping her sherry. “Let you see for yourself.”

  Supper had been over for half an hour, but still the impression given was that the elderly were journeying, slowly journeying, from half-finished puddings to their appointed lounges and favourite chairs. From a point which no longer existed (the puddings would already have been thrown out, or given to the dogs, or recovered for the next day) to one which some of them may have feared they had forfeited by their absence, however brief, they fanned out, as best they could. A quitting which seemed to be getting slower by the minute, too, more enfeebled. Most were too absorbed in the act of moving – many with the help of sticks or zimmers – to be in a position to attempt anything else. Who was next to whom, therefore, was determined not by affection but by mobility. Arch-enemies, for all William knew, went side by side because they hadn’t the strength to be anywhere else. Such conversations as there were were more apparent than real – unsteady monologues happening to dovetail for a moment. “They give me ice-cream an awful lot.” “I don’t like jelly.” Matron, approaching from behind, addressed them all by name; but as though afraid that they would fall if they tried to address her in return, she didn’t linger, and didn’t appear to want the minister or William to linger either. And indeed there were few acknowledgements of her passage – fewer than there were farts and groans and belches. (To fart, William noticed, the elderly stopped altogether, leaning on their sticks or zimmers and looking straight ahead.)

  Walking almost normally, though stopping now and then, was a Miss Anderson. William was introduced to her. “Our new helper,” matron said, as if William had been chosen from hundreds. There was a cluster of black hairs on Miss Anderson’s chin, her cheeks were a high colour, and her eyes, as from a lifetime of scheming and frustration, were angry and scornful. She told William that she hadn’t enjoyed supper at all and that she hoped he would get to work on the cook. Then, cupping her left hand where her left breast would have been, she stood back and admired William. Boldly admired him. She was still admiring him, still holding the memory of a breast in her quivering cupped left hand, when he said goodbye, following matron and the minister down some stairs. He walked without effort these days, head and eyes steady, hands steady too. And today he felt youthful as well. He supposed it was a common experience for newcomers: a sense of increased vigour brought on by so much evidence of decline. He noticed the firmness with which matron descended the stairs, using the bannister for effect rather than from necessity, once looking back at him, quickly smiling, tossing her head.