In the hospital waiting-room I repeated the performance, and having filled in a form, or rather dictated most of it to the receptionist, such was the imagined force of my pains just then, I was soon taken down a corridor to a consulting room where I was laid out on a raised couch and left alone.
Five minutes later a young Indian medico arrived in a white jacket with half a dozen ballpoints sticking up in his front pocket. He was a very small man, narrow-headed, with vague, heavy-lidded, apparently quite aimless eyes. His hair was dark and greased with a Disraeli kiss-curl neatly imprinted on his forehead like a bass clef.
He took one of the ballpoint pens from his pocket as if to make notes, though he had no paper with him.
‘What seems to be the matter?’ he asked, looking away from me towards the clouded glass window through which he could see nothing. He seemed sleepy, almost asleep. His English was perfect, almost without accent.
‘Pains,’ I said grunting. ‘Here. I don’t know — but I have an ulcer disposition.’
I had lowered my trousers and taken up my shirt.
‘Where?’ he asked, paying attention at last. I showed him. He prodded my stomach with the top of his ballpoint, as if keen not to sully his fingers.
‘Higher up,’ I said. ‘And don’t prod me with that pen. It hurts.’
The man said nothing. But next time he used his fingers when he probed me.
‘Sick — have you been sick?’
‘No. But I feel sick.’
‘Have you ever had a barium meal? With your London doctor?’
‘No.’ The man thought for half a minute about this, his head turned away from me, dreaming again. He seemed only just in touch with life. Perhaps he’d been up all night on duty.
‘It’s just there, the pain, is it? The upper middle of the stomach?’ He pushed me fairly hard, so that I had no difficulty in almost screaming.
‘Yes,’ I said breathlessly. ‘There. That’s it.’
‘Emm …’ he said. He took up his ballpoint again and flipped it in the air several times.
‘It’s as if a stake had been driven through me,’ I said.
‘Peritonitis, I should think, if the pain is that bad.’
‘What?’
‘Bad ulceration. You have an ulcer disposition? Well there’s a risk of a perforation. I told you, if it really pains like that.’
‘And?’
‘We should probably operate. Have you signed a disclaimer form?’
‘Operate? No, I’ve signed nothing.’
‘I’ll have one sent round. Meanwhile I’ll arrange for a barium meal and an X-ray.’
‘I don’t think I want an operation, surely. Just keep me in for observation, no?’
‘Yes. But if it bursts, well — we’d be too late,’ the Indian said offhandedly.
‘A second opinion? Could we have that?’
‘Yes.’ He turned away, in a dream again. ‘You’d have that anyway. But the consultant isn’t in just yet. Nor the surgeon. I’ll arrange for a meal and an X-ray meanwhile. Then we can operate — or not, as the case may be.’ He turned back to me. ‘The nurse will give you something for the pain. All right?’
I nodded and he left me. God, I thought, an operation. I had obviously overplayed my part. If they operated. But of course they wouldn’t — when the X-rays showed nothing amiss. They would then simply keep me in bed under observation for a few days. But could I be sure? Of course, I could simply refuse the operation and leave the hospital, release myself. But that wouldn’t serve my purpose at all. I had to stay in the hospital and find out where Clare was; that was the whole point. I was suddenly uneasy then, all my earlier confidence gone.
A nurse arrived and gave me a pain-killing injection, and soon afterwards the same nurse helped me into a wheelchair and a porter drove me down interminable corridors to the X-ray department. I still had my stick with me, and the suitcase. I felt like a very old man, incapable of anything. The pain-killer made me drowsy.
The barium meal — a nasty, cherry-and-milk flavoured concoction — together with the X-ray took up most of the morning as I had to wait my turn in line. And afterwards I was left to wait again in a cubicle nearly an hour while they studied the results.
But eventually I had the verdict. The Indian doctor saw me again. There was nothing wrong with my gut, he said. Nothing at all, as far as the X-ray plates went.
‘Just your ulcer disposition.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Or maybe a grumbling appendix.’
‘It still hurts, certainly.’
‘Well, we’ll keep you in for observation anyway. Just in case. And no food, in case we have to operate. All right?’
I nodded, relieved at last. And by lunchtime, though I was ravenously hungry, I was safely a-bed, sitting up in Arthur’s flashy dressing-gown, in one of the long modern wards that ran away at the back of the building towards the car-park, with my suitcase gone but with my bamboo stick still with me, as I’d insisted, leaning up against the bedside table.
I was halfway down one side of a general ward of about thirty beds, nearly all of them filled, with only two where the curtains had been pulled round in tactful silence. For the rest, the patients were a garrulous lot, when they did not hawk and cough and groan. The noise increased around lunchtime, some of the old men behaving with the excitement of predatory animals over their food. And afterwards, smacking their toothless chops, they talked to each other, loudly, often across several beds, swapping raucous notes on the past and future of their various complaints. The place was like a strange zoo, or some contemporary and unpleasant open-stage theatrical event. It was impossible to sleep.
The man immediately to my left, an elderly Cotswolds type who must have been in his eighties, swathed in bandages, soon got talking to me. He spent little enough time enquiring of my illness; his own misfortune entirely absorbed him and I was a captive audience. He was a passionate gardener, he told me, and had been out in his back patch a fortnight before where he had an old wooden-framed greenhouse. It had suddenly collapsed all over him, in a high wind up on the wolds — the same thunderstorm, I imagined, that had come up to me in the valley — and he had been badly cut about the head and neck by the falling glass.
‘I didn’t know what hit me,’ the old man explained. ‘I thought it were one of those Yankee bombers from the Heyford base, I did.’
‘Dear me,’ I commiserated with him. Though I hoped not to encourage him, for I could see he loved his mishap. And sure enough, almost immediately, he proceeded to repeat the misadventure in every detail, from start to finish.
By late afternoon, the old man still talking, I could bear it no more. I asked the nurse if there was a day-room for patients on the mend. I was feeling much better. There was, and she allowed me to go to it. So, wrapped up in my colourful dressing-gown, I limped out of the ward.
Once outside and moving towards the day-room, I had free run to explore all the many corridors and wards in the main part of the hospital. And it wasn’t long, wandering up and down these passageways, before I came on the children’s wards. There was two of them, both on the ground floor, both running back towards the car park. The first, with its high-sided white cots, was for the youngest of the children. The one next was for children of Clare’s age. The doors into both were open as I passed by. It was just after 5.30. Many relatives and friends were already inside the wards visiting, and many more were arriving immediately behind me as I walked along the corridor.
When I reached the end I turned sharply back. I decided to take the risk: just to walk calmly into the wards, with the crush of other visitors, take a look around, then walk out again. I could say I was lost if anyone stopped me.
But no one did, as I entered the first ward. Everyone, children, parents and the few nurses, was totally taken up with their own affairs. I glanced and smiled at the beds as I walked down the centre aisle. But Clare was nowhere to be seen. And then, right at the end of the ward, I saw four glass-walled, private rooms, for iller children I assumed, or private patients. Walking through another open door here I saw that three of the rooms were occupied. There were visitors in two of them. But in the third room, right at the back, at the very end of the corridor, through the glass partition, I saw Clare sitting up in pyjamas at the end of her bed. A nurse, a young Chinese girl, was playing with her, or trying to at least occupy her with some toys.