To Room Nineteen (26 page)

Meanwhile, Mary Parrish, doctor who specialized in small children, finding herself at the open door of a ward looked in, and invited Dr Anderson to do the same. It was a very large room, very clean, very fresh, with barred windows. It was full of cots and small beds. In the centre of the room a five-year-old child stood upright against the bars of a cot. His arms were confined by a straitjacket, and because he could not prevent himself from falling, he was tied upright against the bars with a cord. He was glaring around the
room, glaring and grinding his teeth. Never had Mary seen such a desperate, wild, suffering little creature as this one. Immediately opposite the child sat a very large towheaded woman, dressed in heavy striped grey material, like a prison dress, knitting as comfortably as if she were in her kitchen.

Mary was speechless with horror at the sight. She could feel Hamish stiff and angry beside her.

Dr Kroll came back down the passage, saw them, and said amiably: ‘You are interested? So? Of course, Dr Parrish, you said children are your field. Come in, come in.’ He led the way into the room, and the fat woman stood up respectfully as he entered. He glanced at the straitjacketed child and moved past it to the opposite wall, where there was a line of small beds, placed head to foot. He pulled back the coverings one after another, showing a dozen children aged between a year and six years – armless children, limbless children, children with enormous mis-shapen heads, children with tiny heads and monstrous bodies. He pulled the coverings off, one after another, replacing them as soon as Mary Parrish and Hamish Anderson had seen what he was showing them, and remarked: ‘Modern drugs are a terrible thing. Now these horrors are kept alive. Before, they died of pneumonia.’

Hamish said, ‘The theory is, I believe, that medical science advances so fast that we should keep even the most apparently hopeless people alive in case we find something that can save them?’

Dr Kroll gave them the ironical smile they had seen before, and said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. That is the theory. But for my part …’

Mary Parrish was watching the imprisoned little boy, who glared from a flushed wild face, straining his small limbs inside the thick stuff of the strait jacket. She said, ‘In Britain strait jackets are hardly ever used. Certainly not for children.’

‘So?’ commented Dr Kroll. ‘So? But sometimes it is for the patient’s own good.’

He advanced towards the boy and stood before the bars of the cot, looking at him. The child glared back like a wild animal into the eyes of the big doctor. ‘This one bites if you go too near him,’
commented Dr Kroll; and with a nod of his head invited them to follow him out.

‘Yes, yes,’ he remarked, unlocking the big door and locking it behind them, ‘there are things we cannot say in public, but we may agree in private that there are many people in this hospital who would be no worse for a quick and painless death.’

Again he asked that they should excuse him, and he strode off to have a word with another doctor who was crossing the court in his white coat, with another big bunch of black keys in his hand.

Hamish said, ‘This man told us that he has directed this hospital for thirty years.’

‘Yes, I believe he did.’

‘So he was here under Hitler.’

‘The mongrel upstart, yes.’

‘And he would not have kept his job unless he had agreed to sterilize Jews, serious mental defectives, and communists. Did you remember?’

‘No, I’d forgotten.’

‘So had I.’

They were silent a moment, thinking of how much they had liked, how much they still liked, Dr Kroll.

‘Any Jew or mental defective or communist unlucky enough to fall into Dr Kroll’s hands would have been forcibly sterilized. And the very ill would have been killed outright.’

‘Not necessarily,’ she objected feebly. ‘After all, perhaps he refused. Perhaps he was strong enough to refuse.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘After all, even under the worst governments there are always people in high places who use their influence to protect weak people.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And he might have been one.’

‘We should keep an open mind?’ he inquired, quick and sarcastic. They stood very close together under the cold snow in a corner of the grey courtyard. Twenty paces away, beyond walls and locked
doors, a small boy, naked save for a straitjacket and tied to bars like an animal, was grinding his teeth and glaring at the fat knitting wardress.

Mary Parrish said miserably, ‘We don’t know, after all. We shouldn’t condemn anyone without knowing. For all we know he might have saved the lives of hundreds of people.’

At this point Dr Kroll came back, swinging his keys.

Hamish inquired blandly, ‘It would interest us very much to know if Hitler’s regime made any difference to you professionally?’

Dr Kroll considered this question as he strolled along beside them. ‘Life was easy for no one during that time,’ he said.

‘But as regards medical policy?’

Dr Kroll gave this question his serious thought, and said, ‘No, they did not interfere very much. Of course, on certain questions, the gentlemen of the Nazi regime had sensible ideas.’

‘Such as? For instance?’

‘Oh, questions of hygiene? Yes, one could call them questions of social hygiene.’ He had led them to the door of the main building, and now he said: ‘You will, I hope, join me in a cup of coffee before you leave? Unless I can persuade you to stay and have a meal with us?’

‘I think we should catch our bus back to town,’ said Hamish, speaking firmly for both of them. Dr Kroll consulted his watch. ‘Your bus will not be passing for another twenty minutes.’ They accompanied him back through the picture-hung corridors to his office.

‘And I would like so much to give you a memento of your visit,’ he said, smiling at them both. ‘Yes, I would like that. No, wait for one minute, I want to show you something.’

He went to the wall cupboard and took out a flat object wrapped in a piece of red silk. He unwrapped the silk and brought forth another picture. He set this picture against the side of the desk and invited them to stand back and look at it. They did so, already prepared to admire it, for it was a product of one of the times when he was not depressed. It was a very large picture, done in clear blues and greens, the picture of a forest – an imaginary forest with clear
streams running through it, a forest where impossibly brilliant birds flew, and full of plants and trees created in Dr Kroll’s mind. It was beautiful, full of joy and tranquillity and light. But in the centre of the sky glared a large black eye. It was an eye remote from the rest of the picture; and obviously what had happened was that Dr Kroll had painted his fantasy forest, and then afterwards, looking at it during some fit of misery, had painted in that black, condemnatory, judging eye.

Mary Parrish stared back at the eye and said, ‘It’s lovely; it’s a picture of paradise.’ She felt uncomfortable at using the word paradise in the presence of Hamish, who by temperament was critical of words like these.

But Dr Kroll smiled with pleasure, and laid his heavy hand on her shoulder, and said: ‘You understand. Yes, you understand. That picture is called
The Eye of God in Paradise.
You like it?’

‘Very much,’ she said, afraid that he was about to present that picture to her. For how could they possibly transport such a big picture all the way back to Britain and what would she do with it when she got there? For it would be dishonest to paint out the black, wrathful eye: one respected, naturally, an artist’s conception even if one disagreed with it. And she could not endure to live with that eye, no matter how much she liked the rest of the picture.

But it seemed that Dr Kroll had no intention of parting with the picture itself, which he wrapped up again in its red silk and hid in the cupboard. He took from a drawer a photograph of the picture and offered it to her, saying, ‘If you really like my picture – and I can see that you do, for you have a real feeling, a real understanding – then kindly take this as a souvenir of a happy occasion.’

She thanked him, and both she and Hamish looked with polite gratitude at the photograph. Of course it gave no idea at all of the original. The subtle blues and greens had gone, were not hinted at; and even the softly-waving grasses, trees, plants, foliage, were obliterated. Nothing remained but a reproduction of crude crusts of paint, smeared thick by the fingers of Dr Kroll, from which emerged the hint of a branch, the suggestion of a flower. Nothing remained except the black, glaring eye, the eye of a wrathful and
punishing God. It was the photograph of a roughly-scrawled eye, as a child might have drawn it – as, so Mary could not help thinking, that unfortunate straitjacketed little boy might have drawn the eye of God, or of Dr Kroll, had he been allowed to get his arms free and use them.

The thought of that little boy hurt her; it was still hurting Hamish who stood politely beside her. She knew that the moment they could leave this place and get on to the open road where the bus passed would be the happiest of her life.

They thanked Dr Kroll profoundly for his kindness, insisted they were afraid they might miss their bus, said goodbye, and promised letters and an exchange of medical papers of interest to them all – promised, in short, eternal friendship.

Then they left the big building and Dr Kroll and emerged into the cold February air. Soon the bus came and picked them up, and they travelled back over the flat black plain to the city terminus.

The terminus was exactly as it had been four or five hours before. Under the low grey sky the black chilled earth, the ruins of streets, the already softening shapes of bomb craters, the big new shining white building covered with the energetic shapes of workers. The bus queue still waited patiently, huddled into dark, thick clothes, while a thin bitter snow drifted down, down, hardly moving, as if the sky itself were slowly falling.

Mary Parrish took out the photograph and held it in her chilly gloved hand.

The black angry eye glared up at them.

‘Tear it up,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Why not? What’s the use of keeping the beastly thing?’

‘It wouldn’t be fair,’ she said seriously, returning it to her handbag.

‘Oh,
fair,’
he said bitterly, with an impatient shrug.

They moved off side by side to the bus stop where they would catch a bus back to their hotel. Their feet crunched sharply on the hard earth. The stillness, save for the small shouts of the men at work on the half-finished building, save for the breathing noise of
the machine, was absolute. And this queue of people waited like the other across the square, waited eternally, huddled up, silent, patient, under the snow; listening to the silence, under which seemed to throb from the depths of the earth the memory of the sound of marching feet, or heavy, black-booted, marching feet.

When he had first seen Barbara Coles, some years before, he only noticed her because someone said: ‘That’s Johnson’s new girl.’ He certainly had not used of her the private erotic formula:
Yes, that one.
He even wondered what Johnson saw in her. ‘She won’t last long,’ he remembered thinking, as he watched Johnson, a handsome man, but rather flushed with drink, flirting with some unknown girl while Barbara stood by a wall looking on. He thought she had a sullen expression.

She was a pale girl, not slim, for her frame was generous, but her figure could pass as good. Her straight yellow hair was parted on one side in a way that struck him as gauche. He did not notice what she wore. But her eyes were all right, he remembered: large, and solidly green, square-looking because of some trick of the flesh at their corners. Emerald-like eyes in the face of a schoolgirl, or young schoolmistress who was watching her lover flirt and would later sulk about it.

Her name sometimes cropped up in the papers. She was a stage decorator, a designer, something on those lines.

Then a Sunday newspaper had a competition for stage design and she won it. Barbara Coles was one of the ‘names’ in the theatre, and her photograph was seen about. It was always serious. He remembered having thought her sullen.

One night he saw her across the room at a party. She was talking with a well-known actor. Her yellow hair was still done on one side, but now it looked sophisticated. She wore an emerald ring on her right hand that seemed deliberately to invite comparison with her eyes. He walked over and said: ‘We have met before, Graham Spence.’ He noted, with discomfort, that he sounded abrupt. ‘I’m
sorry, I don’t remember, but how do you do?’ she said, smiling. And continued her conversation.

He hung around a bit, but soon she went off with a group of people she was inviting to her home for a drink. She did not invite Graham. There was about her an assurance, a carelessness, that he recognized as the signature of success. It was then, watching her laugh as she went off with her friends, that he used the formula:
‘Yes, that one.’
And he went home to his wife with enjoyable expectation, as if his date with Barbara Coles were already arranged.

His marriage was twenty years old. At first it had been stormy, painful, tragic – full of partings, betrayals and sweet reconciliations. It had taken him at least a decade to realize that there was nothing remarkable about this marriage that he had lived through with such surprise of the mind and the senses. On the contrary, the marriages of most of the people he knew, whether they were first, second or third attempts, were just the same. His had run true to form even to the serious love affair with the young girl for whose sake he had
almost
divorced his wife – yet at the last moment had changed his mind, letting the girl down so that he must have her for always (not unpleasurably) on his conscience. It was with humiliation that he had understood that this drama was not at all the unique thing he had imagined. It was nothing more than the experience of everyone in his circle. And presumably in everybody’s else’s circle too?

Anyway, round about the tenth year of his marriage he had seen a good many things clearly, a certain kind of emotional adventure went from his life, and the marriage itself changed.

His wife had married a poor youth with a great future as a writer. Sacrifices had been made, chiefly by her, for that future. He was neither unaware of them, nor ungrateful; in fact he felt permanently guilty about it. He at last published a decently successful book, then a second which now, thank God, no one remembered. He had drifted into radio, television, book reviewing.

He understood he was not going to make it; that he had become – not a hack, no one could call him that – but a member of that army of people who live by their wits on the fringes of the arts. The moment of realization was when he was in a pub one lunchtime near
the BBC where he often dropped in to meet others like himself: he understood that was why he went there – they
were
like him. Just as that melodramatic marriage had turned out to be like everyone else’s – except that it had been shared with one woman instead of with two or three – so it had turned out that his unique talent, his struggles as a writer had led him here, to this pub and the half dozen pubs like it, where all the men in sight had the same history. They all had their novel, their play, their book of poems, a moment of fame, to their credit. Yet here they were, running television programmes about which they were cynical (to each other or to their wives) or writing reviews about other people’s books. Yes, that’s what he had become, an impresario of other people’s talent. These two moments of clarity, about his marriage and about his talent, had roughly coincided; and (perhaps not by chance) had coincided with his wife’s decision to leave him for a man younger than himself who had a future, she said, as a playwright. Well, he had talked her out of it. For her part she had to understand he was not going to be the T. S. Eliot or Graham Greene of our time – but after all, how many were? She must finally understand this, for he could no longer bear her awful bitterness. For his part he must stop coming home drunk at five in the morning, and starting a new romantic affair every six months which he took so seriously that he made her miserable because of her implied deficiencies. In short he was to be a good husband. (He had always been a dutiful father.) And she a good wife. And so it was: the marriage became stable, as they say.

The formula:
Yes, that one
no longer implied a necessarily sexual relationship. In its more mature form, it was far from being something he was ashamed of. On the contrary, it expressed a humorous respect for what he was, for his real talents and flair, which had turned out to be not artistic after all, but to do with emotional life, hard-earned experience. It expressed an ironical dignity, a proving to himself not only: I can be honest about myself, but also: I have earned the best in
that
field whenever I want it.

He watched the field for the women who were well known in the arts, or in politics; he looked out for photographs, listened for bits of gossip. He made a point of going to see them act, or dance, or
orate. He built up a not unshrewd picture of them. He would either quietly pull strings to meet her or – more often, for there was a gambler’s pleasure in waiting – bide his time until he met her in the natural course of events, which was bound to happen sooner or later. He would be seen out with her a few times in public, which was in order, since his work meant he had to entertain well-known people, male and female. His wife always knew, he told her. He might have a brief affair with this woman, but more often than not it was the appearance of an affair. Not that he didn’t get pleasure from other people envying him – he would make a point, for instance, of taking this woman into the pubs where his male colleagues went. It was that his real pleasure came whe he saw her surprise at how well she was understood by him. He enjoyed the atmosphere he was able to set up between an intelligent woman and himself: a humorous complicity which had in it much that was unspoken, and which almost made sex irrelevant.

On to the list of women with whom he planned to have this relationship went Barbara Coles. There was no hurry. Next week, next month, next year, they would meet at a party. The world of well-known people in London is a small one. Bit and little fishes, they drift around, nose each other, flirt their fins, wriggle off again. When he bumped into Barbara Coles, it would be time to decide whether or not to sleep with her.

Meanwhile he listened. But he didn’t discover much. She had a husband and children, but the husband seemed to be in the background. The children were charming and well brought up, like everyone else’s children. She had affairs, they said; but while several men he met sounded familiar with her, it was hard to determine whether they had slept with her, because none directly boasted of her. She was spoken of in terms of her friends, her work, her house, a party she had given, a job she had found someone. She was liked, she was respected, and Graham Spence’s self-esteem was flattered because he had chosen her. He looked forward to saying in just the same tone: ‘Barbara Coles asked me what I thought about the set and I told her quite frankly …’

Then by chance he met a young man who did boast about Barbara
Coles; he claimed to have had the great love affair with her, and recently at that; and he spoke of it as something generally known. Graham realized how much he had already become involved with her in his imagination because of how perturbed he was now, on account of the character of this youth, Jack Kennaway. He had recently become successful as a magazine editor – one of those young men who, not as rare as one might suppose in the big cities, are successful from sheer impertinence, effrontery. Without much talent or taste, yet he had the charm of his effrontery. ‘Yes, I’m going to succeed, because I’ve decided to; yes, I may be stupid, but not so stupid that I don’t know my deficiencies. Yes, I’m going to be successful because you people with integrity, etc., etc., simply don’t believe in the possibility of people like me. You are too cowardly to stop me. Yes, I’ve taken your measure and I’m going to succeed because I’ve got the courage, not only to be unscrupulous, but to be quite frank about it. And besides, you admire me, you must, or otherwise you’d stop me …’ Well, that was young Jack Kennaway, and he shocked Graham. He was a tall, languishing young man, handsome in a dark melting way, and, it was quite clear, he was either asexual or homosexual. And this youth boasted of the favours of Barbara Coles; boasted, indeed, of her love. Either she was a raving neurotic with a taste for neurotics; or Jack Kennaway was a most accomplished liar; or she slept with anyone. Graham was intrigued. He took Jack Kennaway out to dinner in order to hear him talk about Barbara Coles. There was no doubt the two were pretty close – all those dinners, theatres, weekends in the country – Graham Spence felt he had put his finger on the secret pulse of Barbara Coles; and it was intolerable that he must wait to meet her; he decided to arrange it.

It became unnecessary. She was in the news again, with a run of luck. She had done a successful historical play, and immediately afterwards a modern play, and then a hit musical. In all three, the sets were remarked on. Graham saw some interviews in newspapers and on television. These all centred around the theme of her being able to deal easily with so many different styles of theatre; but the real point was, of course, that she was a woman, which naturally
added piquancy to the thing. And now Graham Spence was asked to do a half-hour radio interview with her. He planned the questions he would ask her with care, drawing on what people had said of her, but above all on his instinct and experience with women. The interview was to be at nine-thirty at night; he was to pick her up at six from the theatre where she was currently at work, so that there would be time, as the letter from the BBC had put it, ‘for you and Miss Coles to get to know each other’.

At six he was at the stage door, but a message from Miss Coles said she was not quite ready, could he wait a little. He hung about, then went to the pub opposite for a quick one, but still no Miss Coles. So he made his way backstage, directed by voices, hammering, laughter. It was badly lit, and the group of people at work did not see him. The director, James Poynter, had his arm around Barbara’s shoulders. He was newly well-known, a carelessly good-looking young man reputed to be intelligent. Barbara Coles wore a dark blue overall, and her flat hair fell over her face so that she kept pushing it back with the hand that had the emerald on it. These two stood close, side by side. Three young men, stagehands, were on the other side of a trestle, which had sketches and drawings on it. They were studying some sketches. Barbara said, in a voice warm with energy: ‘Well, so I thought if we did
this
– do you see, James? What do you think, Steven?’ ‘Well, love,’ said the young man she called Steven, ‘I see your idea, but I wonder if …’ ‘I think you’re right, Babs,’ said the director. ‘Look,’ said Barbara, holding one of the sketches towards Steven, ‘look, let me show you.’ They all leaned forward, the five of them, absorbed in the business.

Suddenly Graham couldn’t stand it. He understood he was shaken to his depths. He went off stage, and stood with his back against a wall in the dingy passage that led to the dressing rooms. His eyes were filled with tears. He was seeing what a long way he had come from the crude, uncompromising, admirable young egomaniac he had been when he was twenty. That group of people there – working, joking, arguing, yes, that’s what he hadn’t known for years. What bound them was the democracy of respect for each other’s work, a confidence in themselves and in each other. They
looked like people banded together against a world which they – no, not despised, but which they measured, understood, would fight to the death, out of respect for what
they
stood for, for that
it
stood for. It was a long time since he felt part of that balance. And he understood that he had seen Barbara Coles when she was most herself, at ease with a group of people she worked with. It was then, with the tears drying on his eyelids, which felt old and ironic, that he decided he would sleep with Barbara Coles. It was a necessity for him. He went back through the door on to the stage, burning with this single determination.

The five were still together. Barbara had a length of blue gleaming stuff which she was draping over the shoulder of Steven, the stagehand. He was showing it off, and the others watched. ‘What do you think, James?’ she asked the director. ‘We’ve got that sort of dirty green, and I thought …’ ‘Well,’ said James, not sure at all, ‘well, Babs, well …’

Now Graham went forward so that he stood beside Barbara, and said: ‘I’m Graham Spence, we’ve met before.’ For the second time she smiled socially and said: ‘Oh I’m sorry, I don’t remember.’ Graham nodded at James, whom he had known, or at least had met off and on, for years. But it was obvious James didn’t remember him either.