The Convalescent Read online

  Who indeed? Shamed, William grasped the old knees as if, given time, he might learn to embrace them. There was a strong smell of urine, and, as the corpse was lifted onto the stretcher – expertly by Sophie, woefully by William – there was a fart. William looked at Sophie, who whispered that this was quite normal: the dead could fart for days.

  “Celebrating their release, d’you suppose?” William said.

  Sophie laughed, pushing the stretcher out of the dormitory, pushing it then slowly, almost playfully, for all the world, William thought, like one trying to divert a patient before an operation.

  “You’re used to this?” he asked.

  “Soon you’ll be too.”

  “Had she any family?”

  “A sister, I think,” Sophie said. “She was a peculiar shape, you know. Thin arms, long legs, knock-kneed, but an enormous stomach. Did you notice?”

  “I never got to know her.”

  “Just now, I mean. Did you notice then?”

  “I can’t say I did.”

  “Ah.”

  It was still a lesson in death. These were apparently the sort of details it was unfortunate to miss. William had missed them because he had been too aware of his instructress. Diverted by the living, you weren’t drawn down to the dead, to corpses, with their smells and their uselessness. It was perhaps inappropriate, he knew, to be so aware of Sophie at a moment like this, but he didn’t care, for it allowed him to contemplate the laying out of the corpse without dismay or dread. If this was his way, so be it. It was with a kind of sensuous gratitude, therefore (as if, aroused by the living, he had begun the long task of making peace with the dead), that he entered the old billiard room.

  The table was covered by a white cloth on which there were dark stains. They lifted Miss Bethune onto it and Sophie arranged a sheet over her, leaving the face uncovered. The lights above the table were bright, and showed a face so lined and sunken that it was difficult to see it as having any expression at all.

  “I’ll get matron now. Can you watch her for a minute? She’ll not bite, only fart.”

  She smiled, turned, and was swiftly gone.

  The only other things in the room were two wooden chairs. They had been placed on either side of the table, as for the convenience of those who wanted to contemplate the dead in profile. Not wanting to do this, William stood about twelve yards back, in the area of shadow that lay beyond the central pool of light. Miss Bethune’s eyes were still open – was it matron’s responsibility to close them? They appeared to be staring deeper into the lights above, or deeper into death, than anyone had done before. Left on his own, William felt almost nothing; but thinking that this was weak, a betrayal of his mood of some moments before, he began to circle the table, stopping now and then to see if the face, viewed from this angle or that, affected him at all (saddened him, sickened him, alarmed him), but finding that it did not. After a while it seemed a pointless thing to be doing, but he didn’t want to stand still again and he didn’t want to turn his back on the corpse. To see if dawn was breaking he glanced over his shoulder. It was not breaking. The darkness and the silence – as if conspiring in the interests of his, William Templeton’s, appreciation of death – were intense. Round and round he went, therefore, tiptoeing exaggeratedly, until he could imagine the vigil becoming endless. And until, without quite knowing what he was doing, he had fiddled with the light switches, first plunging the room into darkness, and then – overtones of the dead watching the living, now, rather than the living the dead – having the table and the corpse in shadow, the rest of the room brightly lit.

  Eventually, lulled perhaps by his orbit about the corpse, William felt calmer. He walked over to the table and looked down. He had never read to this woman, not Mansfield Park nor Prester John nor even one of the ladies’ romances (Celia of The Heights, Clarissa’s Return, The Maid of Menteith) that were so popular in the Montgomery. Whatever she had read in her eighty-odd years, it didn’t show now. Nothing showed now. The dead stare, the lips slightly parted, the curled old tongue, the toothlessness, a remote gurgling, as of gastric juices settling for the last time, a smell of dried sweat: all this he was able to notice. And the long legs? The thin arms? The enormous stomach? Astonishing himself, he sought her hands under the sheet and discovered that dead fingers couldn’t be kneaded. His knuckles brushed the enormous stomach. Enormous and cold. Enormous and old. Enough. He withdrew his hand and held it, clasped in his other hand, before his chest, like one who wonders if he has been guilty of a violation. Then he stepped away, back into the area of shadow, knowing that he was not guilty. To search the dead for their secrets, he understood, was ridiculous, for they had none. To touch their hands therefore was simply to say goodbye. As he had done. The point, the consummation of his vigil.

  When matron and Sophie entered, matron walked straight over to the table, first confirming that there was no pulse, then, with the surreptitious deftness of one leaving a tip, closing the eyes and pulling the sheet over the face, her pride in these final acts greater, apparently, than her dislike of being wakened. Sophie stood silently beside William. It was his impression that she and matron had been arguing.

  “I could have closed the eyes,” William said. “Now we are all up at four-thirty.”

  “It’s not four-thirty,” matron said. “It’s five-thirty. Time flies with the dead. No, Sophie was quite right to wake me. The fact that nobody else does under such circumstances is neither here nor there.”

  “The others close the eyes, then?” William asked.

  “No I do – in the morning,” matron said.

  “Ah,” William murmured, more knowingly than he had intended.

  There was a silence. Sophie was not going to break it, and William felt that he had said enough.

  “You might as well go back to bed, William,” matron said, ruffling her hair. “And you, Sophie, might as well go off duty; you’ve only another twenty-five minutes left.”

  “Thank you, matron,” Sophie said dully.

  She hurried away, not bothering to wait for William, letting doors swing back in his face which normally she would have held open. At first he was tempted to let her go; but then, grave and curious and pitying after his vigil with Miss Bethune, he went after her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, catching up with her. “What have I done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why are you so angry?”

  “Matron. It’s usually matron.”

  “All right, tell me.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” Sophie said, her anger, now that she had stopped hurrying, giving way to distress. “And I think I’m too tired to try and explain.”

  “That’s feeble,” William said, aware that they were approaching his room. “Come in for a moment. Come in and explain.”

  She gave him a look in which curiosity and exasperation, appreciation and doubt were combined. Then she nodded.

  “All right. I should say, though, that I’m a bit annoyed with you too. Why shouldn’t matron, whose place this is really, check them at the end? Do the final honours? Why did you offer to save her the trouble?”

  “All I was suggesting was that she could check them in the morning. Let others …”

  “But they don’t decide to die in the middle of the night, do they? And they don’t die every night. The time of death should be respected; and the time of death isn’t five hours after it.”

  “Was she annoyed at being wakened?”

  “I wish she had been,” Sophie said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “That at least would have been normal. But she’s never normal. Have you noticed that? All right if you say so, Sophie, but I can’t see the point. Another of your games, Sophie, which I’ll play because otherwise you’re so useful, but really it’s rather a silly game. That’s not anger; it’s contempt. Don’t you feel it, William? It’s everywhere – in the corridors, the lounges, the notices, the furnishings, the food, the silences. It’s even in here, as we speak.
Don’t tell me you’ve not felt it?”

  “How old are you, Sophie?” William asked after a pause. Although not as disarmingly as he would have done in the old days, when confidence had given him charm, and charm confidence, he spoke as disarmingly as he could, for he wasn’t so much looking for an answer as trying to gauge if Sophie was likely to understand him. “I ask because, since coming here, I’ve been struggling to keep going, though it might not have been obvious, I know … Well, the trouble with that kind of struggle is that it narrows your vision. You tend to limit what you take in, believing that if you take in too much you’ll sink. You can’t afford to suspect too much. And you reduce the intensity with which you have your suspicions. I used to have many more, I think. Yes, many more.”

  It was apparent that they weren’t quite getting through to each other. As though to admit it, make light of it, begin the move beyond it, they both laughed. But the following silence was an awkward one. William felt that he ought to be able to do something about it. (As the older of the two, didn’t he have responsibilities?) Standing behind the chair looking down at Sophie – she was sitting on the bed with her back against the wall now, an attitude of willed alertness – he took off his white jacket (it smelled of Miss Bethune, it smelled of death) and cast it from him. As though this would help him to think more clearly. But he knew that no kind of gesture would make any difference: he had lost the art of making himself plain. The new art (if there was one) was one of brave approximation. Too much had happened for it to be otherwise. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four years old (she had never said), Sophie remained silent, as if to give him a chance to explain himself further. It looked like patience, but, as was evident after another moment of silence, it was not: it was strictness. It had happened between them before, though never so sharply: just when he thought her young, she would appear experienced, experienced, she would appear young. Either way, the effect on him was the same: he felt challenged to extend himself (tales for the girl; explanations for the woman).

  “So you’re not especially disturbed by matron?” Sophie looked at him, looked away, as if offended by any kind of hesitancy. “Of the two,” William said, leaning on the back of the chair, “I’m more disturbed by the minister.”

  “Can you separate them? Are they not one?”

  “How d’you mean exactly?”

  “They stand or fall together. They’re a team. Anything he lacks, she has, and vice versa. The place is in their grip. I can’t imagine what we could do to remove them.”

  “Literally remove them, do you mean?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at him directly. “Yes.”

  “Are there any crimes you know for certain they’ve committed?”

  William asked. “I mean, particular crimes in which you think we might be able to interest a board or tribunal? Impressions and suspicions won’t be enough, you know.”

  “Would you be prepared to write a letter, William?” she asked softly. “A letter to the papers, a letter which will make influential people sit up? I’m no good at letters, but I’m sure you are.”

  William wasn’t particularly good at letters either, but for some reason he allowed Sophie to think that he was. And this meant allowing her to imagine other things about him as well, such as that he had once had scholarly leanings, modest literary ambitions, a talent for quiet advocacy. She was smiling at him now, head cocked, one hand on the bed beside her, the other lightly caressing her ankles. Was he desired (to his surprise, he thought that he was desired) for his own sake, or because she was beginning to see him as an ally, a fellow subversive in the dimly charted world of the Montgomery? Was it he, William, who excited her, or the thought of what they might achieve together – the sort of team they would be, faced by the unfathomable deviousness and malice she obviously found in matron and the minister?

  “You’re very charming, Sophie,” he said thickly.

  “So you’ll not write letters?” she said, pretending to pick a thread from the coverlet.

  “But what offences can I mention? I’ll have to be specific, as I said. I’ll have to be able to say, for example, that on the tenth of January last year the minister strangled an old lady in her bed, and that a week later matron allowed someone to starve to death. Have there been such cases?”

  “No,” Sophie said quietly. “No, there haven’t been.”

  “Then what can I put in this letter you want me to write?” Head bowed, Sophie lifted a hand to the back of her neck, as though there was tension there.

  “There have been no offences as such, neither major nor minor. But that’s not really it. No. It’s not so much what they do as what they are. It’s their spirit that’s wrong. They don’t care about the patients, and they don’t care about death. They don’t care.”

  “Possibly I’ll come to agree with you,” William said. “But you must realise that I can’t say that in a letter. We’d be laughed out of court. They may be as terrible as you think, but it would be libel to have it printed.”

  Sophie’s head remained bowed, as if she was painfully familiar with the story of what couldn’t be done.

  “There must be a way,” she said. “I hate them, you know!” She looked up, her eyes even angrier and more frustrated than her words.

  “Do the patients hate them?” William asked, looking at her closely, wondering if there was something perverse in this youthful passion.

  “Those that can still hate, do hate them. They make that clear. To me at least.”

  “They tell you they hate them?”

  “Not in so many words. But I can see it.”

  William was silent for a moment, searching for an agreeable way of suggesting to Sophie that she might be painting an unjustifiably dark picture. “How do you know it’s hate? They may simply rather dislike them.”

  Sophie’s face was suddenly twisted with impatience.

  “Have you always been as cautious as this?”

  “What I’m trying to suggest …”

  “Answer my question!” she repeated, banging the bed beside her.

  He had managed to be frank with Miss Friel because she didn’t speak and possibly didn’t even listen. He had been lulled by the elevated obscurity of her silences, treating her – who might, if she ever spoke again, talk with remorseless triteness – as someone venerable. Why then shouldn’t he be frank with Sophie, who might become famous for her honesty and daring?

  “I’ve been open with Miss Friel …”

  “And what were her last words,” Sophie interrupted, “heard by Margaret, May and me? Eh? ‘The flesh which falls from me goes straight to the minister.’”

  “Words of hatred, I agree,” William said. “No, I’ve not always been as cautious as this. By no means. I was once famous for my lack of caution. My devilry, even. It may be hard to believe now, but it’s true.” He sat on the edge of the bed, looking down. “If you can guess the truth about matron and the minister, I’m sure you’ve guessed it about me. A familiar story. I’ll not tell you now though. All I’ll say is that I’ve not always been like this. And what I was, I can hardly believe I was. Or I can hardly believe I’m now this. If one’s past and present are in tension, totally different countries, one of them can seem to be an illusion. Sometimes it’s as if I was that – oh, definitely was that – and this is a kind of epilogue, a dry run towards death, full of illusions of recovery and balance; or I am this and that was mere chaos, unreal, pointing nowhere. For one lifetime to have had two such selves … No, I’ve not always been cautious.”

  It was apparent that Sophie was riding her intuitions, invigorated by them. The effect on William was challenging. Did he share these intuitions or not? Was it enough scrupulously to gather evidence for or against the view that someone was bad? Acceptable to have a view even although you couldn’t support it, referring instead to the triumph of intuition? If you couldn’t support it, was that a sign that it was perhaps wrong? If there was water divining, could there not also be a divinin
g of souls?

  He had to admit that in the presence of matron and the minister he had been aware of a certain balefulness. He had had a sense – not that he had ever been so proud as to consider it an intuition – that over the old or the innocent they might lunge suddenly forwards, either the one or the other or both together, and that the lunge might then seem to have been inevitable, expression of some deadly earlier calculation.

  He felt tossed about between suppositions as Sophie regarded him, waiting for a fuller answer to her question. He knew that she wouldn’t have any patience with vexed distinctions of any kind. She was in the full flood of youth and he, if he had even known that, was well beyond it now, compelled to ask himself if there could ever be any virtue in uncertainly.

  He leant back against the wall beside her. She was smiling at him, but he hardly noticed. Suddenly, as though lowered by something in his own words, some shadow of pain or disaffection, he longed for rest and silence.

  “You’re the man I’ve been waiting for, William,” Sophie said, putting on an American accent and chuckling.

  “Do you mean you’re hooked on failures, and I’m a prize example?”

  “No. You’ve come through. You’re ready for the next round.”

  “With you?” he said dryly. “Against those two?”

  “Something like that,” Sophie said quietly, laying a hand on his arm.

  Just as he was wondering what to do or say next, William saw that Sophie had stood up, without giving him a glance, and was undoing the buttons down the front of her white nurse’s uniform. So casually did she do it, with such a dreamy unawareness of time and place, that he wondered for a moment if she had forgotten that she was not in her own room and was preparing for bed. She took off her slip in the same way, and then her pants. Only then, naked, did she look at him. She was smiling.