Any Human Heart (53 page)

Putney Vale Crematorium on a cold April day must be one of the most lugubrious and depressing places in the country. An absurd Victorian chapel doubles ingeniously as a crematorium set in the middle of a huge, rambling, untidy necropolis. Around the chapel loom dark yew trees, like giant hooded monks, conferring more gloom on an already gloomy scene.

Peter came and a surprising number of strangers also — old colleagues of Gloria, obscure relatives. Peter asked me where she had died. At my flat, I said.
Your
flat? All his old suspicious antagonism reddened his face. Then he collected himself: very good of you, old chap, he said.

He became more voluble and questioning back at his hotel, curious to discover why his ex-wife had died in his oldest friend’s basement flat. He asked me if I had really liked Gloria. Of course, I said: she was marvellous company — very funny, very blunt, wonderfully rude.

‘You see, I think I never really knew her,’ he said in a puzzled voice.

‘You married her, for God’s sake.’

‘Yes. But I think that was more of a sort of sex-intoxication thing. Never known anyone like Gloria for, you know, getting me going.’

We ordered some sandwiches from room service and continued our attack on the whisky bottle. I noticed the waiter called him ‘Mr Portman’. What’s wrong with Scabius, I asked?

‘I’m not meant to be here — my accountant would have a heart attack if he knew I was in London.’

‘Ah, tax. Very good of you to come back. Gloria would have been very touched. No, seriously.’

‘The very fucking devil, these taxes. I’m thinking about Ireland. Apparently you pay no income tax if you’re a writer. But then there’s the risk of the IRA.’

‘I don’t think you’d be an IRA target, Peter.’

‘You’re joking. Anyone with a profile like mine’s got to be at risk.’

‘Wonderful houses in Ireland,’ I said. It wasn’t worth it.

‘Why don’t
you
go?’ he said. ‘How can you live here with these taxes? You work two months for yourself, ten for the taxman.’

‘I live very simply, Peter. Very simply.’

‘So do I, dammit. I’m going to regret this whisky. If my doctor saw me drinking this he’d wash his hands of me… How’s Ben keeping?’

‘Cancer. Prostate — but he seems to be winning.’

This news depressed him and he started to list his own complaints — hardening arteries, angina, increasing deafness. We’re falling apart, Logan, he kept saying, we’re pathetic old wrecks.

I let him rant on. I don’t
feel
old, although I must confess the signs of ageing are everywhere. My legs have grown thinner as the muscles shrink — and they’re practically hairless; my buttocks are disappearing, the seat of my pants loose and empty. One funny thing: my cock and balls seem slacker, lower-slung, hanging freer between my legs. And they look bigger too, as they do when you’ve just stepped out of a hot bath. Is this normal or is it just me?

I forgot to say in the midst of all this Gloria sadness that I had a letter from Noel Lange’s office saying that I had been left a property in France in the will of a Monsieur Cyprien Dieudonné.
²
For one mad moment I thought it might have been Cyprien’s own chartreuse in Quercy but looking more closely at the address and after consulting my atlas I see the house is in the Lot, a
maison de maître
outside a village called Sainte-Sabine. So I’ve written back saying, sell it. Gloria too has left me everything she owns, which amounts to £900 in her current account (thank you, Pablo), two suitcases of clothes and the contents of a storage container in a warehouse in Sienna. What am I meant to do with that? What I need is a benefactor of real substance.

[On Monday, 7 June, at 11.30 a.m. as LMS was crossing Lupus Street, SWI, he was hit by a speeding post office van and badly injured. He was rushed by ambulance to St Thomas’s Hospital for emergency surgery. His spleen had ruptured, his skull was fractured and his left leg was completely broken in three places, not to mention serious bruising and abrasions on his body.

After his operation (he had metal pins inserted in his leg) he was moved to St Botolph’s Hospital in Peckham and installed in Ward C. The journal resumes some four weeks after the accident.]

One of the old ladies who comes round the ward with puzzle-books and sewing-kits has procured me a biro and writing pad and so finally I am able to log my impressions of this infernal place. Swiss roll and lumpy custard for the third time this week. I’m sorry, but Swiss roll is not a pudding; Swiss roll is a cake. Someone in the catering department is raking off money that should be going to provide proper puddings. Completely typical of this place — built in the nineteenth century and still redolent of that century’s values and practices. For example Ward C is vast, a huge high-ceilinged room like a village hall or a school chapel, and was purpose-built as a ward with tall thin windows on three sides to let in as much ‘healing’ sunlight as possible. There are thirty beds in here, twice as many as ever intended, and the nursing staff is overstretched, harassed and very short-tempered. I spent two weeks marooned in a middle aisle before Paula — the only nurse I like — managed to have me moved to a corner. So now I only have one neighbour — though the current occupant, an old wino, leaves much to be desired. These warm sunny July days make the ward cook up like a greenhouse. At mid afternoon we are lying gasping on our beds, running with sweat, those with the energy or power fling back the bedclothes and fan ourselves with magazines and newspapers. I won’t dwell on the noxious marshy odours that rise up from the exposed sheets. It has provided a small glimpse into the physical conditions of the Victorian age: when you come to think of it everyone must have been intolerably hot in summer — clothes were thicker, people wore many more layers of them, it was considered impolite to remove a jacket. The stench of body odour from both men and women must have been overpowering. Then factor-in all the horse manure on the street… Nineteenth-century London must have stunk like a cesspit.

My left leg is enclosed up to the hip in plaster, rendering me more or less immobile. I piss in a bottle and if I want to shit I have to summon a nurse. I refuse to use a bedpan so they have to wheelchair me to the lavatory. There I park myself on the pan and do my business. There are no doors on the stalls. The nurses hate me for not using a bedpan.

The only vaguely pleasurable consequence of my plastered leg is that I have to have a sponge bath. This is done brusquely and efficiently but for two minutes I return to infancy again — arms are lifted and armpits laved, a cool sponge ducks around my genitals, I lean forward and my back is swabbed. A no-nonsense towelling and a dusting of talcum powder finish off the procedure. If that milkcow Sister Frost heaved out a breast for me to suckle, then the picture would be complete.

The food is disgusting, condemnable — the worst I’ve eaten since my schooldays at Abbey. We are provided with every institutional horror imaginable — mince with watery mash and tinned veg.; a fish pie with no fish; curried eggs; jammy, doughy dumplings with lumpy custard. You have to eat it — especially me, stuck here in my bed. Once a day someone pushes round a trolley and you can buy biscuits and chocolate bars for extra sustenance. It is a truly terrible diet — everyone complains of constipation.

Paula is the only nurse I like because she calls me Mr Mountstuart. I thanked her and asked her for her surname. ‘Premoli,’ she said. Right, Miss Premoli it shall be, I said but she asked me to call her Paula in case the other nurses thought it odd. Interesting surname, I observed, and she told me she was from Malta. But you’ve red hair, I said, unthinkingly. And you’ve got grey hair, she replied: how funny is that?

[NOTE IN RETROSPECT. My memories of the accident itself were very incomplete and disjointed. I had always noted, since my return to London, that post office vans were invariably driven helter-skelter as if the drivers were in danger of missing some crucial deadline or appointment. The one that hit me must have been doing 60 or 70 mph. But it was entirely my fault: my mind was on something else — I simply didn’t look — and I stepped out into the road with as much pre-emptive caution as if I were crossing my kitchen floor. Apparently I was flung some fifteen yards by the impact. I remember nothing of the actual crash itself and experienced no pain. I woke up some two days later in St Thomas’s, wondering where the hell I was and what I was doing. I was very lucky to be alive, I was told. Someone from the post office’s customer relations department sent me a bunch of wilting gladioli ‘wishing me a speedy recovery’. Unfortunate choice of adjective, I remember thinking at the time.]

OBSERVATIONS FROM WARD C

Massive bowel evacuation today after what I realize was effectively two months of constipation. Feel better but become simultaneously conscious of just how much weight I’ve lost. I’m now a skinny old buzzard whose hair needs cutting.

This is a geriatric ward though no one will actually admit it. No one here is younger than sixty. It’s a geriatric ward in the same sense as a cancer ward. We are all old men with old men’s problems. Many of us die. The ward is too big for me to do an accurate count and patients are always being moved around (to disguise the fatalities?). I would say around thirty of us have died since I arrived here.

Paula went on her summer holiday yesterday. Where are you going? I asked. Malta, silly. She wears a gold cross around her neck — good Catholic girl. Her replacement is a male nurse called Gary — he has many lurid tattoos.

The man I hate most is four beds along from me. His name is Ned Darwin but I refer to him as Mr No-Fuss. The nurses love him: he never complains, he always has a bright observation and a cheery smile for everyone, he seems to relish the food. He has had a stroke but can limp about fairly well with an arm-crutch. He knows all the nurses’ names. He came up to me on one particularly hot day and tapped my plaster leg. ‘Must be itching like crazy under there, I’ll warrant.’ He’s the type of man who uses phrases like I’ll warrant’, ‘yea or nay’ and ‘much obliged’. I told him to fuck off.

I demanded to see some sort of managerial/administrative figure to protest about the absence of doors in the lavatories (a significant factor in our collective constipation problem, in my opinion). This was rocking the boat in a very unequivocal way and drew darker looks than usual from the nurses. A young, suited man eventually appeared and listened to what I had to tell him. ‘This measure is in place for your own safety, Logan,’ he said. I asked him to call me Mr Mountstuart, which he neglected to do, not employing any name thereafter. Nothing is going to happen: I have merely enhanced my reputation as a troublemaker.

The description of the Pecksniff family’s trip to London in
Martin Chuzzlewit
(Chapters 8 and 9) is the greatest passage of comic writing in English Literature. Discuss.

The drain has been removed from the area of my spleen. The ache in my leg seems reduced. No side effects so far from my fractured skull. I must have seen ten doctors since arriving here, each one taking up my case with no evidence of foreknowledge: ‘So, you were in some kind of a car crash?’, ‘Oh, I see you ruptured your spleen.’ I don’t blame them and I don’t blame the nurses. I hate living in this ghastly place — God knows what it must be like working here. The thought remains, however: there must be a better, more humane, more civilized way of looking after our sick and infirm. If the state is going to take the job on, then it has to be done in a wholehearted way: everyone is demeaned by this petty, vindictive, penny-pinching, care-less world.

This is the first time in my life that I have been badly injured and seriously unwell; the first time I have had an operation and a general anaesthetic; the first time I have been in hospital. Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell — their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.

A new sister on the ward: ‘I hear you won’t use a bedpan.’ You hear correctly, I said. Then she said that if I ‘needed the toilet’ I had to go under my own steam or use a bedpan, nurses would no longer be detailed to wheel me to and fro, it took up too much valuable time. Then you’d better find me some crutches, I said, because I will not be using a bedpan. You’re not authorized crutches, she said with a triumphant smile, and a bedpan was brought. So, when I needed a shit I hauled myself out of bed and managed to make my way over to No-Fuss. ‘Can I borrow your crutch? Thanks.’ I knew he didn’t want to lend it to me because he thought he’d get into trouble. Sod him.

The spleen. My ruptured spleen. I looked the word up in an encyclopedia. ‘A small purplish red organ that lies under the diaphragm. The spleen acts as a filter against foreign organisms that infect the bloodstream.’ In the crash my spleen burst. In medieval times the spleen was regarded as the source of melancholy emotions in man. Hence ‘splenetic’ — a tendency to produce melancholy or depression of spirits, having a morose or peevish disposition. I worry that my ruptured spleen has released its special poison into my body. Is this the source of my new bile-filled and rancorous nature?

I worry about my flat — no one’s been there for weeks. Paula asked me why I never had any visitors and I said my family all lived abroad — a pathetic lie. I said my daughter was in America. ‘Still, you’d have thought she’d’ve come over to see her dad,’ Paula said.

A Roman Catholic priest came round. ‘Paula told me you were of our faith.’ How did Paula know? Do we give ourselves away, somehow? Certain words, expressions, gestures… In some way or another our common ground must be revealed. I told him that I was a devout atheist and that I’d lost my faith at the age of eighteen. He asked me if I had never felt God’s love in my life. I told him to look around this room with its cargo of human suffering and misery. But God is in this room, he insisted with a smile. I said no plumbline could fathom the depths of my faithlessness — quoting John Francis Byrne, Joyce’s friend, at him. He didn’t know what to say to that, so I asked him to leave.