In the Middle of the Wood (19 page)

“Action?”

“And I'll tell you another thing. These pills you're taking make you impotent. That's why your wife doesn't visit you. His wife never comes to see him,” he said to Ralph. “ ‘Cos he's impotent and he smells. Don't you, old man?” Hugh smiled tolerantly. “It's true though she never comes to see you. And you smoke too much. You'll die of smoking, old man.”

“Ronny watched the television till midnight,” said Hugh. “What was it last night, Ronny? Was it
Frankenstein
? Ronny here never got his O levels, did you, Ronny? He wasn't in school long enough. You were jinking, weren't you, Ronny? You wait till that sister comes. She's got it in for you.”

“I did,” chanted Ronny. “I did get my O levels. You don't even know what O levels are. They weren't invented when you were in school, old man.” And he doubled up with laughter.

“Run away and polish your head,” said Hugh calmly.

“Polish your head, polish your head,” Ronny chanted, laughing again with a high nervous noisy sound. Everything he did was tense and nervous and jerky as if he were a twanging wire, while all the time the psychologist smiled in the corner, now and again getting up to tidy his bed compulsively.

“Breakfast,” said Hugh, glancing at his watch.

“What kind of watch is that?” said Ronny. “That's a Russian watch. The old man is a Communist. What Communist gave you that watch, old man?”

“I'm going for my breakfast,” said Hugh and padded out of the room. After a while, Ralph and the psychologist followed him.

“I don't want any breakfast,” shouted Ronny. Ralph and the psychologist walked along side by side past the office. Ralph wanted to speak to his companion: his silence bothered him. He hated being judged by that silence; and yet when he was writing there was nothing he liked better. He hadn't talked much to Linda thinking that in comparison with his own, her concerns were trivial. He would have liked to have been self-sufficient as a stone. Yet here he wished to speak.

“I wonder what they'll have for breakfast,” he said.

“I don't know,” said the psychologist, but didn't add to his statement. What a clever fellow he is, thought Ralph, he is doing this deliberately. And he was ashamed of himself for having spoken first as if it had been a culpable weakness.

They queued for their food and then sat at the same table. By now Ralph could recognize one or two people, including Lady Macbeth and the tall thin man whom he had seen pacing up and down in the ward the day before, and who had clearly been shifted. People stared morosely down at their plates. Opposite him sat an old man whose mouth moved continually, as if he were in the process of having a stroke. Now and again he would find someone staring at him and then he would remind himself that after all this was a drama group which had been hired to drive him mad.

“You must take your food,” said a nurse to a young girl who was standing at the door.

“I don't want to.”

“You must take it. The doctor said you had to take it.” The young girl sat sulkily at a table near the door but made no attempt to eat.

When they had finished their food the handicapped girl, who had told him about the phone call, cleaned all the tables and cleared the plates away. She looked white-faced and angry, as if the diners offended her by their slovenly manners. After breakfast was over, Ralph followed the others into the lounge.

When he had had his pills in the lounge carefully dispensed from a trolley, he walked back to his room. Ronny was sitting on his bed staring down at the floor.

“Should you not be taking some pills?” said Ralph.

“I'm not taking them.”

After a while he added, “I'll get the bastard yet.”

“What bastard?”

“My stepfather.”

“Your stepfather?”

“That's right. He's a naval officer.”

Stepfather, thought Ralph. So they're at it again. And a picture of his own stepfather returned to him, silent and bookish, always disapproving. Perhaps that was why he himself had become a novelist, creating new worlds for himself to escape that terrible silence. If only his stepfather had once shouted at him but, no, whenever he did anything wrong or was too noisy, then that awful silence had descended: he had felt himself less important than one of his stepfather's books. What was the secret of those books, their calming cold secret mystery? He must try and find out. And so he had tried to read them, to placate his stepfather, as if by reading he might enter that world and, little by little, he had done so. Had he done the same with Linda, repeated the silences which he himself had endured? Had he cast his disapproval on her too? But, no, that did not excuse her, unless she had grown to hate him as much as he himself had hated his stepfather. And now he in turn had entered the kingdom of silence. It was his weapon as it had been his stepfather's. The sins of the stepfathers are visited on the children.

“He beat me up, the bastard,” said Ronny. “But he won't do it again. I'm bigger than him now.”

“What did he beat you for?” said Ralph.

“For nothing. He took it into his head. Because of school sports. Report cards. Anything.”

“And what about your mother?”

Ronny snorted but didn't answer. Ralph thought of the mother as suave, svelte, ambitious, dressed in fine clothes, standing beside her husband at parties. He said, “You should take your pills, you know, or they'll put you in a worse ward.”

“I don't care. I've been in one already. I like the nut cases.”

“As if you are not one yourself,” thought Ralph. But the cunning of the scheme almost overwhelmed him. Imagine putting him in with a stepson, just as he had been himself. Was there nothing that they hadn't thought of? The labyrinthine plot attracted him, repelled him. It was so huge, so luminous in its ramifications. It was almost beyond the scope of the human mind. How much he had underestimated Linda. It was she who was the novelist, not him.

“So one day I left the house and I swallowed a lot of aspirins,” Ronny was saying. “I couldn't stand the bastard any longer.”

“I tried everything,” Ralph thought, “I abased myself. I read his books even though I didn't understand them. I wanted to know his secret, to enter his world, to make him notice me. But he didn't notice me. There was nothing I could do that would make him notice me. There was only that terrible silence as cold as crystal. It was as if he hated me for existing, for being an interruption to his books.”

His head spun: he couldn't understand what was happening to him. It was as if, even while he was growing up, this plot was being woven about him: everything that had happened to him, everything that he was, contributed to this story which was torturing him.

And a kind of tenderness for Ronny overwhelmed him. “Please,” he said. “Please. Take your pills.”

Ronny raised his head as if the tone of Ralph's voice had attracted him: he hearkened like a dog that is listening to a sound that no human ear can hear.

“I might,” he said. “I might at that.”

And suddenly Ralph began to tell him his own story. He told him of the hotel, of the black doctor, of the tapes, the taxi driver, he told him of his journey into the wood, and Ronny listened seriously.

But he did not really appear interested till Ralph told him about his own stepfather, of his silences, of his disapproval. Nevertheless while he was talking to him Ralph was thinking, This boy is an actor, he has been planted here. There can be no other explanation, there have been too many coincidences. Why should I be confiding in an actor, whose profession is being used to destroy me. Yet some impulse had made him break his silence, speak endlessly as if he were talking to himself.

“I'll tell you something, he makes me feel like shit,” said Ronny. “I'll strangle the bastard.” And his face became ugly and angry so that Ralph felt frightened that the boy might attack him. And then it occurred to him, That is what they are gambling on, that this boy might confuse me with his stepfather, that in the middle of the night he might attack me with a banned razor. And he was frightened again and wanted to leave the ward, but he stayed. Sometimes now he didn't care whether he was killed or not. It might not last very long anyway, the fact of death, it might last only a moment, the stab in the stomach, the strangling, the throttling. And in any case what did he have to look forward to? This boy would be doing him a favour.

Should he not simply say to him, “I am your stepfather,” and let events take their course? Should he not tender himself as a sacrifice to that desperate rage?

He remembered the night he had shouted at his stepfather, “I'll burn the house down. Send for the police. I don't care.” And his father standing by the phone saying, “I will. Don't think I won't.”

And himself, “Do it then.” And at that moment if he had had a match he would have burnt the house down. His stepfather trembled and shook, his face was twisted with hatred and helplessness, and his mother had come between them and said, “If you send for the police you'll ruin his life, don't you understand?” And he hated his mother then and always. How had she married this iceberg? Could she not see what he was like? That he had no love in his bones? And sometimes in the night he had heard them whispering together and thought that they were talking about him.

Ronny was looking at him with a hostile gaze now. He was saying, “I've changed my mind. I won't take the pills. They can do what they like.” And he stalked out of the ward with the careless stride of youth that does not think of consequences. And Ralph was left alone again.

He walked to the window. The leaves were stirring in a breeze and the two men were gathering them in their wheelbarrow. It was to a ward such as they inhabited that Ronny might be sent if he continued with his disobedience. Ralph glanced up at the hat which hung above the lamp but realized that this was not the ward it was in.

He took a pad from his locker and tried to write but he could write nothing. Then very seriously in the silence of the room he began to note down reasons why he believed there was a plot against him. He headed his notes
THE PLOT
and numbered his reasons as if he were a bureaucrat.

He studied what he had written and tried to think of other items to record but he seemed for the moment to have exhausted his questions. He would present his list to that lady psychologist when he had his first meeting with her. He would show her that he was not to be trifled with, that he had a clear cool brain, that he had read psychology and knew what he was talking about.

Finally he thought of another question, Why was there a procession of men carrying coffee cups in the corridor?

“Oh, that,” said Hugh. “There's a coffee machine along there. Do you want to come along for a coffee?”

Ralph and Hugh and the psychologist walked along the corridor together, Hugh scuttling along very fast as was usual with him. They passed Lady Macbeth who was pacing up and down in her endless circles. A woman in a nightgown came out of a room and said, “Why is my room full of tourists? They came on a bus and they are lying in the beds. Where did they come from? You tell me that.”

“Tourists?” said Hugh.

“Tourists. I can't understand their language. They came off the bus and into my room. Why did they choose my room? They didn't come for Bed and Breakfast, I can tell you.” She thrust her haunted face towards them. “I've had Americans and I should know. There was a woman came to my house one day and she examined the sheets, and she said, ‘I think they will do'. ‘Well,' I said to her, and I grabbed her skirt and looked at her underskirt and I said to her, ‘Do you think that is clean enough for my sheets?' She didn't like it.”

“You'll be all right,” said Hugh. “They're not tourists. What nationality do you think they are?”

“I think they're Germans.”

“They're not Germans anyway,” said Hugh. “I was in the war.”

“Well then they might be Dutch. They're not so bad. I had a Dutch boy in my house and he took pictures all the time. Even when I was at the sink he was taking pictures. But then he began to steal my things. He stole my ornaments and then he stole my dog.”

“They're all right if they're Dutch,” said Hugh.

And the three of them walked along to the coffee machine.

“There was no one there,” said Hugh. “No one at all.”

When they got back to their room Hugh lit another cigarette. “I don't know if my wife will come today. I gave my sons my business, you know, after I came out of the hospital last time.”