We looked at one another. I owed my life to them. I wanted to thank him, but I couldn’t remember Jackie’s proper name.
‘I was lucky you realised I was ill.’
‘That was easily told. Unconsciously you must have known you were bad. It was help you were after . . . unconsciously.’
‘I can see that.’ I tried to match his seriousness. ‘I only remember that whole day in bits. I don’t suppose some of it happened at all. I was at a . . . party.’
‘You’ve been to plenty of those.’
He said it dourly. I wondered why he had come if he disapproved of me. Was it possible that Jackie had insisted that he come? The compliant husband; my stitches throbbed.
‘Fooling around is all right until you fail your exams, then the easy companions disappear. You’re on your own. Fellowship is all right, if you choose the fellows.’
Kennedy as Polonius. Later when I woke, I lay thinking the poison might still be running like acid in my head.
The place was quiet. The lights were shaded. Behind Brond’s head, I could make out the humped and muffled shape of the barber. Being right under the blankets must have made him feel safe. Brond’s shirt was white with faint yellow markings. As a child at Trailtrow, I had seen new drawn milk turning in a buttery churn. The barber lay dreamlessly still in the hot tent of his breath.
‘You were almost dead,’ Brond said. ‘They tell me you are making a good recovery.’
A tall nurse in the uniform I now recognised as a sister’s passed between the beds. She didn’t seem surprised to see Brond, but glanced our way and went softly by.
‘It’s not the visiting hour.’
My dry tongue filled my mouth.
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Are you a doctor?’
His nose and mouth took on the coarse practicality of a surgeon, but he smiled and shook his head. I didn’t want to think of any other reason why he should be here at this time of night. He was a distinguished looking man – he might have a Nobel Prize for medicine. Perhaps he had invented a bedpan that would let you piss without embarrassment. I couldn’t use the ones they had in here. More poison to fester inside me.
My thoughts chattered above an attentive stillness which was fear.
‘You don’t remember where you saw me before?’ Brond asked.
I shook my head. I denied it. That had been part of a dream when I was sick.
‘That interesting evening at Professor Gracemount’s—,’ he began.
The breath I had been holding sighed out.
‘It comes back to you.’ It was not a question. ‘We had a long talk.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Oh, yes. You told me your ambitions. So, hearing you were ill . . .’
My ambitions? How could I believe that? I had never put them into words even for myself.
‘I found you interesting.’ He spread the bundle of paperbacks on the locker and picked one up. ‘I hoped for something more interesting than this.’ By one corner, he shook it gently at me. ‘This is commonplace.’
Even studied in this shadow-pooled light, it couldn’t be mistaken for the cover of a cowboy story. I had taken the paperbacks too much at first glance and face value, and wasted an afternoon on sagebrush that could have been spent on more intriguing stuff. Inside the blubber, the fat man had hidden shallows.
‘Pornography,’ Brond said, setting the book aside on a note of dismissal. ‘That’s a natural interest at your age, but even in such things there is a hierarchy. I read something once in that line which struck me very much. The man who wrote it was clever and impecunious and young. Like his friends then in Paris, he put that side of his imaginings on paper for money. They pretended to themselves it was done cynically. The truth was not so simple.’
At the far end of the ward, a hard painful effort of coughing began. Like a stone in a pond, it rippled to us in a muted disturbance of sleep mutterings and sighs.
‘He wrote of a man and a woman facing one another across a table. Now and then, she reaches out with a finger and gently strokes him. Their only expression is a certain placidity. They are very tranquil, but then they are drugged. Perhaps something in the eyes if you were able to look very closely. He is a masochist and she is torturing and degrading him. When it is over, there is no blood, no business for the police, no hospital bills to meet. It struck me as an improvement on this world.’ He nodded thoughtfully, ‘They shake hands very correctly, or perhaps they go off together and have tiny cream cakes with black sweet coffee.’
I looked at the books I had got from the fat man on the far side of the barber. Both of them had nagged me to get up; no doubt so that my wound could tear and get adhesions like the ones they bore as veterans.
‘It’s not mine,’ I said. ‘That book. I borrowed it.’
‘You are right,’ he said briskly. ‘You are right. It is better to live in the real world.’ He didn’t say it as if he believed me, but as if it didn’t matter. ‘A student needs books – and money. A student needs time to think about what he needs. He needs to travel. It’s possible for a young man of your ... background not to understand how important that is.’
‘I have my grant,’ I said. My side had begun to ache; the warnings the surgeon had spoken of, coming too late to be useful. ‘And I’ll get a job in the summer vacation.’
‘I will help you. I will find something for you,’ Brond said.
‘No! ... I can get something for myself.’
‘You have determination. That’s good. Character achieves more than brains, if one has to choose. Finish your degree and I’ll find work for you to do. I might have a career in mind.’
‘I know what I’m going to do,’ I lied in fright.
‘Don’t be too determined – that’s a false pride. I’m not such a stranger as you imagine. I have a friend in the place where you lodge. People’s lives become connected. Take help where it’s offered and be a successful man.’ He laughed quietly. ‘That young man in Paris . . . When he was twenty, he had never slept with a woman. One day he stripped himself naked, beat his flesh with a leather belt and felt such joy! At last this is something real, he told himself. Now I join the real world.’
When he had, gone, all the sounds came back, chiming glass and a voice scolding out of a bad dream. The barber was awake. Round his eyes the olive skin furrowed as he watched me from his ambush of pillows.
Yet hours later as I started awake, it was Kennedy who had disturbed my dreams, one hand on the chair as he tick-tacked some mysterious emotion.
‘It’s long years since I’ve stood in a hospital. It must be . . .’ Down the length of the ward, evening visitors were streaming to the door. It was surely time for him to go. ‘We’d been married a year and Val was going to have a child. She had to come in for rest because she had high blood pressure. We lost the baby. I was sure it was a son, but I never asked.’ All the visitors were gone. Kennedy hesitated in isolation. I disowned him. ‘She was in a side room because she was on the danger list. She had a tube into her arm. After that we couldn’t have children.’
I closed my eyes as if in pain; overcome by weakness – though, naturally, not unsympathetic.
‘I can see you’re done with tiredness.’
I heard him move away and opened my eyes. He had stopped at the end of the bed.
‘Take care of yourself,’ he said.
In the middle of the night, sweating out of sleep, it seemed to me his story about Jackie – he was the only one who ever called her Val – had been a kind of blackmail intended to make me see her crotch as out of bounds forever to my hand. When I woke up in the morning I saw things differently. He had opened the door when I was sick and resting my head in the shelter ofher breast.
Prostrate at seven in the convalescent morning, avoiding the barber’s eye, all I needed was a father.