Shuttlecock

[24]

I am amazed at the resignation, the composure of some of Dad’s fellow inmates at the hospital. In my two years’ visiting I have got to know several of them quite well. When I have sat out with Dad on the bench and walked back with him to the terrace and the wicker chairs, it is almost like returning to some haven of civilization after an interlude in the barren wilds. We sit, like old soldiers on a verandah, reflecting on lost glories. The ward windows catch the evening sun until it sinks behind the trees and the boundary wall. The shadows creep along the terrace. Inside, all the chores of the day have been done — meals served, drugs administered, bed linen changed, the ward floors swept and cleaned. The day staff wait to be relieved by the night staff, and Simpson, the ward orderly — who nods familiarly to me, as if I am just another member of the strange club for which he acts as steward — comes out to smoke away his last few minutes of duty. There is peace, order, stability — like nowhere else. And it seems to me that this is because here all the harm has been done; no one can be harmed any more.

They do not look like rebels, these figures in their maroon dressing-gowns and faded bath-robes, like men who have trespassed beyond the bounds of sanity and been penned up for their pains. I have been thinking what would happen if some of those red-faced men with their cigars at the golf course (relaxed and at peace in a different way, and only members of another sort of club) were to be picked up by some giant hand and placed in one of these hospital wards. How they would scream and squeal and kick and be outraged. I would half like to be that giant hand. But these men, in their wicker chairs, they sit as if they are past argument, and even secretly thankful for something.

In the hospital everything goes in circles, or in irreversible regressions. Simpson, for example, used once to be a hospital inmate himself — not in Dad’s hospital but another. When the time came for him to be discharged, he could find no other environment conducive to his peace of mind save that of a hospital and no other work save that of a hospital orderly. But the proximity of his job to his former condition naturally made it easy for him to slip back into it. So, for fifteen years, Simpson has been living in an ambiguous world in which he is sometimes patient, sometimes hospital employee, and even now, on occasion, instead of leaving the hospital at night for his bed-sit, he will nestle beneath the covers of one of the empty beds in the ward, and no one seems to mind. Simpson does not mind, himself. He is fifty-eight, wiry-haired, with leathery, unchanging features. He looks at you with a fixed, capable stare, like some servant of bygone days who would defend to the last his right to be no more than an underling.

Then there is Des. Des, who of all the occupants of Dad’s ward I talk to most and who most takes the role of the one who ‘keeps an eye’ on Dad for me when I am not there. Des was once a Merchant Navy officer and entered the hospital nine years ago as a result of a head injury received in an accident at sea. On recovering, he applied to the relevant authorities for compensation and a disability pension. The authorities replied that the accident had been caused by Des’s own negligence and he was therefore ineligible for compensation. Des denied his negligence and proposed to contest the matter. The response to this — even after Des’s discharge from the hospital — was that the evidence of a man whose mental faculties were in question was inadmissible. For four years Des strove to have his claim upheld. The worry and exasperation involved induced recurrences of mental illness, thus strengthening the position of those judging his case. The constant questioning of his sanity in time dislodged it. He returned to the hospital for longer and longer periods, which eventually merged into a permanent residence in which his hope of receiving justice receded irrecoverably into the never-never. Now he sits on the terrace, like someone relieved at last of some burdensome misconception, and talks on these gentle summer evenings, without a trace of bitterness, of that other man, not himself at all, who by now has command of his own ship.…

This gradual drifting back of discharged patients is a regular occurrence. Newly admitted patients are put into four wards which are for short stays only and from which, in theory, patients are sent out again into the world, wholly cured. In fact, a fair number of these released patients return, and this second visit is already a sign, not so much of incomplete cure, but that they have found the hospital atmosphere amenable and beguiling, they have formed a dependence. Other, longer visits follow the second one; with each, the probability of yet further visits becomes stronger; until they begin to live more out of than in the normal world, and, as with Des, permanent residence becomes inevitable. The hospital accepts this pattern. It is even embodied in its internal structure. For, apart from the two male and two female admission wards, there are, for each sex, five other wards which, broadly speaking, mark off the decline of any given patient. A patient who makes successive returns is gradually passed down the series of wards — first into those where residence can only winkingly be termed temporary; then into those where the prospect of never leaving the hospital is an unspoken certainty; then into those where the outside world ceases to exist, even as a concept. The passage through the wards, as through the mouth of a lobster-pot, is, almost without exception, one-way only. For some reason, the wards, which are normally referred to simply as A, B, C, D and so on, were once given by some euphemist the sweet-sounding names of flowers and trees (‘Acacia’, ‘Anemone’ etc.). There is a joke in the hospital that the ‘G’ in the case of the last male and female wards (‘Gladiolus’ and ‘Geranium’) really stands for ‘Gone Completely’.

Dad is in ‘Eucalyptus’. It is more than halfway along the floral procession of wards (past the still hopeful and, in Dad’s case, briefly visited ‘Chrysanthemum’ and ‘Dahlia’) and therefore past the point where rescue is likely. But they do not seem alarmed, these men in their dressing-gowns. They smoke, offer cigarettes and flick the ash off their knees like ordinary people. And, above all, they do not seem to beg release from the perpetual circles of their ‘conditions’; they have ceased to try to escape. I have enjoyed these men’s company — often silent or obscure, but pleasantly unpredictable and strangely free from everyday anxiety — as much as, if not more than anyone else’s. More than Vic and Eric at the office, with their persistent chatter (which is only mine reciprocated) of cars and hire-purchase schemes and of (they should worry) getting nowhere at work.

Sometimes it strikes me that this agreeable impression is all a tremendous mistake. Sometimes I reflect that these men are ill; inside, they are in torment, they have terrible problems. I think of how little perhaps I know (though it has become familiar enough to me over the months) of the hospital; of what horrors there might be in ‘Fuchsia’ and ‘Gladiolus’ or even behind other, unmentioned and out-of-the-way doorways. And I think of the asylums of old in which the mad were locked away from view like concealed sins; of how these visitors, even now, who appear to flock in so readily on Sundays, perhaps fret and pull against the chain which ties them to the family monster and to an insidious nether-world of nightmares; of how the hospital staff, some of whom, it is true, are decidedly eccentric, manage to stop themselves, amidst all this derangement, from being infected by madness, of how they make the transition after work to the normal world of wives and children. All this gentle liberalism (‘no doors are locked — patients are free to come and go’), all this atmosphere, on the terrace of ‘Eucalyptus’, of tranquillity and strange immunity, even the country-garden rose beds and lawns and rhododendron clumps, which now and then infuse you with a sense of inviolable idyll — all of it perhaps is a lie. But then, can the flowers and the trees lie?

Quite often I play chess with Des, on a fold-up wooden table on the terrace. Whatever has happened to Des’s mind, it is perfectly adept at chess, for he usually beats me. We sit on opposite sides of the table and Dad sits, looking blankly on, between us, as if we have given him the duty of umpire, and now and then we say, keeping up a pretence, ‘Dad’ (for Des uses that word too as if to show he and I have the same interests at heart) ‘where shall I move? Which is the best move? The rook or the bishop?’ And we imagine that when a move is successful it is Dad’s advice that has brought it about. Sometimes I get so absorbed with the game — not just as a means of whiling away the visiting hours but with the game itself and being there on the terrace — that the official time for visitors to leave comes before I am aware of it, and Des has to preserve the position of the pieces for another day. When I show a reluctance to stop, and even to leave at all, Des, and Simpson too, occasionally wink at me, as much as to say, ‘We understand.’

When I play chess with Des I think: a sane man, a man labelled insane cheerfully engrossed in the same activity when there should exist between us an uncrossable boundary line. Sanity? Insanity? Terrible problems? No, their problems are over. And when Des starts to ramble (for occasionally he starts to ramble, like a true hospital inmate), when he starts to speak of that other man, the master of the merchant vessel Eucalyptus, I think, no, it is not madness which is locked up and concealed like a crime, but something concealed behind madness. It was Des himself who, one day when Dad had been not long in his ward, came up to me and said, tapping his nose, ‘You know the meaning of “Eucalyptus”? — “Well-hidden”.’

But all these observations and reflections (you are wrong if you think I am normally a thoughtful man — it is just something brought on by this urge to write things down) I do not make at all about Dad. I only make them about the hospital at large, as if about some abstract proposition. With Dad, despite the regularity of my visits and the continual silence in which we sit, there seems no time for thought or detachment. It is true, with every visit the more likely it becomes that nothing will change, that that silence will be never-ending. And yet each time I cannot help feeling, this time he will speak, and each time is special and urgent. Very often, when I come home afterwards, rather than that strange, lingering calm of the hospital, it is tension I feel; I tremble as if I have been involved in some immense struggle. For perhaps that is what they are, my meetings with Dad. His silence against my wish to hear him speak. We face each other like antagonists across a table (a different sort of chess, this), and one of us must crack first.

Do you recognize me? Answer me.

Is he doing it all to punish me?

I don’t believe it can go on for ever. I don’t believe they will send Dad on to ‘Fuchsia’ and then to ‘Gladiolus’. If he endured the Château Martine (you were tortured, weren’t you Dad? but you came through it) surely he will not yield to this. But only today I thought: perhaps it is by the self-same method he held out then as now: by keeping silent. And who can say that that is not the reason for Dad’s present plight. Maybe what happened long ago at the Château Martine was so terrible as to have delayed effect thirty years later; and maybe while he sits on the wooden bench or on the wicker chair, amidst these innocent, therapeutic surroundings, he is really reliving endlessly — is it possible? — the torture of another time and place.

Sunday. The cedar tree. It was on my lips today to say, ‘You knew X, didn’t you? Who was he?’ What stops me? Is it the fear of seeing Dad’s face suddenly split with real pain? The fear of not being able to bear that?

The fountain was playing on the ornamental pond. We walked back to where the others sat like infinitely sagacious spectators on the terrace. All I said was: ‘I shan’t be here on Wednesday, Dad. I am going to see Mr Quinn.’ (Now I know why I fixed on Wednesday. So Marian won’t know. She’ll believe I’ve gone to see Dad as usual. I’m not going to tell Marian I’m going to Quinn’s.) ‘He’s invited me to his home.’ As if Dad should answer, ‘Ah yes, Mr Quinn, how kind of him.’ ‘He’s going to tell me everything.’ (Or rather, I didn’t say that — only in my head. And nor did I say: ‘Unless you tell me first.’)

‘So till next Sunday then.’

The bell was going for visitors to leave.

‘Don’t expect me on Wednesday.’

I left Dad on the terrace, with Des, Simpson and the others, and as I looked back, his still figure — that strong, intrepid, noble figure — seemed suddenly quite forlorn, as if I were leaving him for good.