If you are getting your treatment free of charge, you have to agree to have it without an anesthetic. You mustn’t pass out.
Through the most abysmal vomits and discharges, when the rays seem to be laying down a thick coat of poison in every organ, you can still hear the urgent, earnest voice of the crippled girl. “Are you conscious? Can you raise your head? Are you aware that you have lost control of your bowels? We must know.” Into your field of vision, blackness spraying off his smooth goggled rubber head, bobs Dr. Alexandre’s assistant, anxious that nothing should escape the record. And into the exhausted calm after the blue-black shower has abated and all three of them have taken off their goggles, the uncertain foreign tones of Dr. Alexandre fall, and you must be awake to answer his questions.
Sometimes the rays don’t arrive at all. What bliss to be let off with a cup of tea in the reception room and told to go home again!
A fortnight after I got here it turned foggy, first a black fog, then a yellow one which filled the streets like gas; but I didn’t miss a treatment. One of the blue bodies got out and drifted about in the garden for a while before it was caught. There was such an expression of puzzlement on its face; as if it knew it had been in the garden before but could not remember when. After a while a man came out and pushed it back into the treatment shed, grumbling and flapping his arms.
The same day I fell asleep on the train on the way back to the hotel, and dreamed I was disembarking from a ship. When I went up on deck with my case and umbrella, a cold wind came off the land and blew my hair into my eyes. It was just before dawn, and the funnels of the ship were dark against a greenish sky like heavily worked oil paint. Down on the shadowy quay muffled figures waited for the passengers. Everybody except me knew where to go and what to do. I shuffled forward, trying to pretend that I knew too. The sun rose while the queue was still slowly leaving the ship. The land never seemed to get any brighter. When I woke up somebody had stolen my red gloves, which had been on the seat beside me.
W.B.’s letters, full of solicitude and domestic calm and ‘the dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white boughs of the ash trees when I take my evening walk,’ drove me out into the fog, to the picture galleries and cafes. I couldn’t stay in the hotel on my own; they look at you so accusingly if you are ill and on your own. In a cafe nobody notices you at all. You can eat your piece of sponge cake, read your letter, and leave. “Seventy pence please.” “Fifty-two pence please.” And you go out with the simple vision of a human face turning away forever, into streets which seem to be populated with wounded soldiers—big, lost-looking boys whose surprised eyes stare past you at something which isn’t there.
“I’m feeling so much better,” I wrote untruthfully to W.B. The rays seemed to have settled in my bones like a deposit of poisonous metal, and I could hardly get out of bed the day after a treatment. “And I get on well with the other women.”
Actually we have no time for one another. Despite our diversity we are all very much alike—a desperate, frightened bunch, concentrating on the only important business we have left, which is survival. We exchange nods as we are hurried along the corridors by wheelchair, too self-involved to speak. In the common room—where without turning your head you can see a countess with ‘anaemia of the brain,’ the mistress of the discredited novelist, and three young prostitutes seeking a cure for some new venereal complaint—we sit like stones. Many of the others have been here for a year or more. If we have a social hierarchy, these old hands are the cream of it. They have their heads shaved once a month so that their hair doesn’t soak up the smell of the treatment shed. They ‘live in’ and look down on the out-patients, whom they call ‘weekend invalids.’ Through their stiff cropped stubble, which gives them as surprised a look as the wounded boys in the streets, I perceive the bony vulnerable plates of their skulls.
When the blue bodies get loose they sometimes wander into the clinic itself, as if looking for something. One evening when the fog was at its height, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant took us downstairs to see one. They were keeping it in a small room with white lavatory-tiled walls. It was supposed to have been left on a bench, but when we arrived it had somehow fallen off and got itself into a corner among some old metal cylinders and stretcher-poles. Its face was pressed into them as if it had been trying to escape the light of the unshaded overhead bulb. Dr. Alexandre’s assistant ran his hand through his hair and laughed. What could he do, he seemed to be asking, with something so stupid? He pulled it back on to the table where it lay blindly like a mannequin made of transparent blue jelly.
“Come and touch it,” he encouraged us. “There’s nothing to be frightened of. As you can see it has no internal organs.” It was quite cold and inert. When you touched it there was a slight tautness, a resistance to your fingertip similar to the resistance you would get from a plastic bag full of water; and a dent was left which remained for two or three minutes. When one of the women began to cry and left the room, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant said, “They have no internal organs. They are not alive in any way medical science can define.”
Before he could move away I asked him, “What becomes of the poor things after we have finished with them?”
I lay in bed for three days at the hotel, very ill and depressed, wondering if it was all worth it. To W.B. I wrote, “Why this mania of mine to stay alive? I feel no better. I can’t even go for a walk or eat a piece of cake! I hate myself for hanging on.” When I caught sight of myself in the mirror I was so thin that my shoulder blades looked like two plucked chicken wings. Sleeping fitfully during the day, I dreamed that I had a goiter which drained all the virtues of the world around me. Everything around me grew two-dimensional and unrealistic, while the thing on my neck fattened up like a huge purple plum. I woke up in a sweat and found myself staring out of the window at a square of sky the colour of zinc.
Later I found that someone had telephoned me, but the hotel people hadn’t thought to wake me up. They said they had made a mistake about my name.
At night I could hardly sleep at all. I stared out of the window; listened to the boys singing under the sodium lamps in their mournful, half-broken voices. Far away a man blew inexpertly on a bugle. One boy lifted up the stump of his arm, which looked as if it was covered with black tar. I thought that if W.B. would let me change my mind and start paying for the treatments I might feel less downcast.
The mornings are dark now, and quite cold. You cannot see inside the cafes for steam; it billows over the pavement where people are buttoning themselves into their overcoats. As Winter approaches, and the women wheel their prams a little quicker along the streets by the river, a thin wind rises round Dr. Alexandre’s clinic. Some little-understood property of the new rays, it seems, is rotting the walls of the treatment shed, so that when you get down on the table now you are surrounded at once by little icy draughts smelling of decayed wood. The wallclock, a very delicate mechanism, stopped and had to be replaced. When they opened it up all its working parts were covered with damp furry mould.