The Convalescent Read online

  “As matron just said there, my name’s William Templeton. How do you do? This is my … seventeenth day in the Montgomery, and certainly my strangest. I’ve really no idea why it should be thought so important to get you to talk. You’ve a right to stay silent if you want to. It’s all the same to me. Anyway, silence is golden. Let sleeping dogs lie. You’ve a nice room here, I must say. If I ever get round to reading again, I may ask to borrow some of your books. I see you have several on birds. I was keen on birds once myself. Does that hawthorn tree attract birds? I’m sure it does! I was once many things, actually – husband, father, publisher, lover, friend to more than a few, peacemaker. I’m now either none of these, or some of them in name only – husband and father, for instance. I took to drink, you see, though I still can’t entirely understand why. Any giving of reasons seems to fall short of the real reason. The real reason … I sometimes feel that that will only become apparent towards the end … (Look! There are some sparrows and blackbirds!) So I’ll not talk about how it became too easy to get bored; how there were no tests or challenges left; how my wife was too clever and vigorous for me; how, eventually, I seemed to be aiming at a kind of invisibility, camouflaged because I was in pieces, a human being in name only; how, failing in this. … Oh no, I’ll spare us both that …”

  As suddenly as he had started, William stopped. The hawthorn tree was scraping thinly against the window, a sound weirdly tentative, midway between silence and actual tearing, clawing. And Miss Friel – or was it himself? – seemed to be holding her breath and rocking gently. He went on:

  “Another thing: my mother was murdered. Oh yes, quite recently too. The spring. By whom and why will probably never be known. But her being done in seems to have brought me to my senses. I wouldn’t have been touched, you know, had she died in bed. Afraid not. Probably wouldn’t even have gone to the funeral. The murder inspired me. Oh, I know I don’t look inspired – the minister thinks me bloodless – but you should have seen me before. Well, I got a job as a caretaker on a farm near here. My first job for years. It was very silent there. Much longer and I’d have been speaking to the fields, the machinery. Or, like you, not inclined, to give tongue at all. One day someone escaped from here – a Mrs Craig, perhaps you knew her? – and I brought her back. How long have you been here? I’m sorry, that’s none of my business, forgive me. I’ve been here seventeen days. But I’ve already told you that. Oh dear …”

  By now William was distressed. Would it have been easier or harder had Miss Friel suddenly spoken? He had no idea. All he knew was that he couldn’t go on speaking without a more definite response than he was likely to get. Why had he imagined that it was all right to say these things in the first place? Miss Friel, no longer smiling now, was probably still a virgin. Had possibly never taken a drink. Would surely have had the remotest acquaintance with murder and murderers. He stood up. Miss Friel stood up also. She was still not smiling. He stood very still, looking at her, aware again of the excessively sweet smell that lay just behind that of milk puddings. She was perhaps just a cracked and stupid old lady, silent out of perversity and using what histrionic skills remained to her to try and make nothing look like something. But then, her smile returning (almost as steady as before), she took his right hand in both of hers and moved it slowly up and down. Approval, encouragement, commiseration, farewell?

  Turning to leave, he saw “Silence, Court in Session” on the back of the door, hanging on the overcoat Miss Friel had apparently resolved never to wear again.

  He went straight to his room then, where, sitting on the edge of his bed, he wept with bitter patience.

  November 4th, 1982

  I walk about the house in my dressing-gown waiting for Margo to come back. She has taken the children to school. I have a hangover and my relation to space and time is strange. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was an explosion in my head and I came out with a stranger one still. One so strange that no one could understand what I was talking about. Since losing my job, I’ve delayed getting dressed. I walk about like this or lie in bed drinking coffee. Today I am uncharacteristically angry, because for the first time in our married life Margo has seen fit to change my underwear. It wasn’t on the chair where I’m sure I left it last night, and when I went to look for it I found it in the laundry basket. I can’t see that this vest and pair of pants is particularly dirty, particularly smelly. I’ve taken them back to the chair, but I won’t get into them until I’ve asked Margo to explain herself. I’d say that although in some areas my judgement has proved tired and mistaken, in this matter of my underwear I’m as reliable as ever. A man should be king of his own underwear. Give over that right and one will be bound and gagged, led by the nose to a table where the right victuals are. Victuals? It’s another of these fragments which come into my head when I’m hungover. “Spartan disguise” was perhaps the most unusual one. “Henceforth I’ll go about in spartan disguise” I heard myself say, following the loss of my job. Why does it happen? I can’t quite say. It’s as if the hungover brain as it turns from disease back towards health (health?) throws off sparks, which appear in my head as these verbal fragments. A kind of cerebral crashing of gears, or skid. “Victuals”, “Spartan disguise”, “The long path that strangles itself ”, “The window without a pane lets fall its brains”: these and other oddities dance into my hangover – or dance at me from its depths. It’s no wonder I drink to calm myself. As I drink now, waiting for Margo.

  The front door bangs. Margo has gone to the kitchen to unpack the shopping.

  I sit where I am, waiting. The underwear waits with me. A cistern goes. I hear Margo coming up the stairs then. From the measured slowness of her walk I can tell that she is looking for me out of duty alone. She doesn’t come swiftly towards me anymore. No wonder. I don’t blame her. The door opens and there she is, still in her coat, her face pale and her dark eyes very alert.

  “Why did you throw out my underwear?” I ask.

  “Because it was dirty.”

  “Is that underwear dirty, would you say?”

  “That is the underwear I put in the laundry basket,” she says, lifting and dropping my pants. “It’s as dirty as I thought.”

  “Are you calling my underwear dirty?”

  “I’m afraid so. I only hope I’ll not have to call you dirty one day.”

  “In what way?”

  “Dirty in body, dirty in spirit. The sin of sloth.”

  “Are you telling me you think it’s coming?”

  Before answering, she crosses the room and sits on the sofa beside me. Her walk is painfully formal.

  “You’ve already had your first drink, and our first conversation is about dirty underwear. Tell me before it’s too late – before you go out, coming back to sleep or collapse in the lavatory – whether you think that a day that starts like this can be saved.”

  She is sitting beside me, but my feeling is that she is circling me. Her hand is on my arm, but I only know this because I can see it.

  I’m visited at this point by the following: “The twins in disrepair abandoned”. Nothing else is in my head and so I speak it, crouched low on the sofa, for all the world like one who fears that his role is to be a medium for such senseless utterances. (Only a drunk would be deceitful enough to describe them as riddles.)

  “You’re talking nonsense, William. You do realise it’s nonsense, don’t you?” She speaks very quietly, eyes on the carpet and as though hardly breathing.

  I stand up and announce that I’m going to get dressed. I also promise to pull myself together before it’s too late. But since, saying this, I’m slipping on my pants, it savours more of an evasion than a promise. Margo doesn’t move; doesn’t speak. She has the air, with her coat still on, of one who doesn’t think it matters what she does, what she says, where she goes anymore. I am now in the underwear she thoughtfully discarded, but I have nonetheless the sense, the very odd sense, that I can see myself – in my dressing-gown again and terribly bored – sitti
ng on the sofa beside her. That I can see us, wife and husband, Margo and William, fixed in poses of lament and wretchedness respectively. Though I dress noisily, my balance being poor, I am sure that I can feel the unutterable silence of this seated couple.

  At last Margo stands up and walks slowly to the door, where she turns. I can see that she has been crying.

  “Do you remember who’s coming for lunch?”

  “Don’t worry,” I answer, mock-alert, “I’ll be there.”

  Her father and brother are coming for lunch. (The son is a repeat, with minor variations, of the father, but the result isn’t boring, for the father is splendid, rich enough to be repeated.) I’m fond of them both and out of their fondness for me they are concerned. I am to be invited to join the family business. In some menial position, of course. A salary will be paid me for putting in a daily appearance. It is the safety net I’ve always known is there. Margo’s money. (Has it played a part, by any chance, in my undoing?) I know what my in-laws think. They think that so long as the money is there and I unemployed I will drink it. The choice therefore is between drunken leisure and a lowly job which may lead somewhere. The son-in-law; the brother-in-law: there he is in office number five learning his new job. His jokes are better than his work, though. That’s the trouble. He’d make a career out of his jokes if he could. A pity there aren’t such posts: the industrial joker, the commercial clown … But what about the intervals between the jokes, and what if the jokes only come if there is a glass before me? “Undone by his jokes”: not really one of my fragments, for I understand it. “Undone by his underwear” neither, for I understand that too.

  I go to the bannisters and call down to Margo in the hall. She is still in her coat, and has been crying again.

  “What is it, William?”

  “D’you think I’ll be the first man to be undone by his own underwear?”

  She’s not amused. I don’t blame her. She walks away. I’m left leaning on the bannisters.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One night at the start of winter William was wakened out of a deep sleep by Sophie. He was slow to recognise who it was, but, when he did, he made a joke of it.

  “I’ll move over. Right away.”

  “Listen, William: Miss Bethune has just died.” She was still shaking him as she spoke. “She’s in the south dormitory. We must get her out before the others wake. Can you help please?”

  She stood by the curtains talking about the death while William got dressed. She had spoken to Miss Bethune at one-thirty, she said, when the old lady had remarked that she hoped the turkey would be properly stuffed this year. Then Miss Bethune had slept. When she checked her at three o’clock, however, she found that she had died.

  “In her sleep and with stuffing on her lips,” William said. He felt erratic at this hour; unable to get his bearings; as though coming at the world from a peculiar angle. The hallucinatory strangeness of the hours before dawn. What was this delicate smell of soap about Sophie? This darkness suddenly flooded by moonlight? These shadowy objects? And what was this talk of death but an old tale in an improbable setting? Closer, he felt, to a fabulous sense of death than to death itself, he splashed cold water on his face, slapped himself on the cheeks.

  “Better than with a curse,” Sophie said.

  “Right. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  William hadn’t seen the Montgomery at this hour before. Blue and yellow bulbs were on in the corridors, their light so weak that there were hardly any shadows. The usual smells, of fish and urine and ancient sweat, were fainter than during the day, so that it was possible – as if they bloomed only in darkness – now and then to smell the flowers. The scents might almost have been released by the silence, though, it was so vast and deep, seeming to include the land beyond the Montgomery as well as the Montgomery, land and institution, as by some law of night, flowing into each other. If, troubled by a dream, one of the elderly had risen and walked the corridors, William doubted that he or Sophie would have stopped him, for terminal wanderings, in such a light, such a silence, would have been as natural as rain from a black sky.

  As they walked, Sophie explained what would happen. The essentials of corpse disposal. She had parked the mobile stretcher outside the dormitory. They would move it to the side of Miss Bethune’s bed and lift her onto it. This was easier said than done, though. Miss Bethune was a large woman, but, even if she hadn’t been, it would still have been difficult. The important thing was simultaneity: they must lift her at exactly the same instant, he at the feet and she at the shoulders, or the other way round. If the legs were lifted first, the head and neck would loll badly; if the shoulders, the legs would appear boneless. Once, Sophie explained, she had tried to lift a corpse by herself, thinking that the old lady in question would prove as light dead as she had done alive. But dead weight was different from living weight, apparently. The body had fallen between the bed and the stretcher, and Sophie had fallen with it.

  “Shouldn’t matron be told?” William asked.

  “She doesn’t like being wakened unless it’s absolutely necessary. ‘What can you say to a corpse?’ she once asked me.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry, though, when we’ve laid Miss Bethune out in the billiard room, I’ll go and wake her, whether she likes it or not. What it’ll mean to her is that there’s now a vacancy.”

  “The waiting list …”

  “Dear Miss Smith,” Sophie mockingly intoned. “A place awaits you in our Montgomery Home for The Elderly. A place, a slab, a memory. Yours truly, The Moth.”

  They spotted the stretcher outside the dormitory. At this hour and in this light it had the air of an object which had got there by itself.

  Sophie stopped outside the dormitory and listened, indicating that William should do likewise. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be listening for, but he cocked his head nonetheless. Silence. Sophie seemed to hear what she was listening for though: very gently, she pushed the stretcher into the dormitory where three slept and one was dead. Though almost soundless, their appearance roused the three ever so slightly: they turned, their breathing changed, there was a minute or two of snoring. Sophie had obviously expected it, for under cover of the snores she manoeuvred the stretcher into the required position.

  Miss Bethune was lying on her side. It would be necessary to roll her onto her back before she could be lifted. William looked on as, with a gentle whisper of “Come on” to the dead woman, Sophie surely did this, the head following the body, the mouth open, the eyes staring, saliva across the chin. Speaking then swiftly and definitely – as if she had appointed herself his instructress for the time – Sophie said again how it was harder to move the dead than the living. If you turn the sleeping, the head comes with the shoulders; if you turn the dead, the head comes last, if at all (this was how some deaths were discovered apparently: the body wouldn’t go with the hands of the living). Then she nodded, going to the shoulders, indicating that William should take the feet. Still in emphatic whispers, still with the air of one giving him lessons in death, she said that he should grasp Miss Bethune firmly under the knees (adding, with a kind of tender casualness, that this shouldn’t be too difficult, Miss Bethune having been knock-kneed).

  Though dressed for the part – his white jacket recently pressed, an air of sober readiness – William didn’t feel it. To meddle with the limbs of the dead, to prepare them for burial or burning, he felt as though he didn’t have the experience necessary for the task and this was entirely his own fault. Sophie was already at work, he saw, crouched behind Miss Bethune, holding her up as if to allow her to vomit. And looking at William. “Come on,” she whispered, nodding at the legs. The legs. Miss Bethune’s legs. He stooped and clasped them, but there was something altogether wrong, he knew immediately, about the way in which he did so. He seemed to be expecting a favour from the corpse; expected it to ease his dread a little. Laying down the head and shoulders, Sophie moved to the legs, pushing William
aside. First, she did what he hadn’t done (wouldn’t have dreamed of doing) – she pulled up Miss Bethune’s nightdress in order to get at the knees more easily; and then, exploiting the fact that the knee is a joint, she held them – bent, the ankles dangling – against her breast, looking at William over the top of them, in her look now a cluster of questions. Do you see? Can you manage? Will you learn? Why so ill prepared? What to fear? Who are you anyway? Who?