The Bachelors (2 page)

‘Well,
your drug makes me worse,’ Ronald said, feeling within himself, at that moment,
the potentialities of a most unpleasant young man.

When he
got the chance of another brief interview with Dr. Fleischer he said, ‘Do you
understand what you are asking me to do when you urge me to persevere? I may
have to undergo the repetitive fits again.’

Dr.
Fleischer said, ‘I am not urging you to persevere. I suggest your failure to
respond to the drug is caused only by emotional resistance.’

‘Do you
realise,’ said Ronald, ‘how long the few seconds of lucidity between the fits
appears to be, and what goes on in one’s mind in those few waking seconds?’

‘No,’
said the doctor, ‘I don’t realise what these lucid intervals are like. I
recommend you to return to England. I recommend… I advise… No, there is no
reason why your intellect should be impaired, except of course that you cannot
exercise it to the full extent that would be possible were you able to follow
and rise to the top of a normal career….’

‘Perhaps,’
Ronald said, ‘I’ll be a first-rate epileptic and that will be my career.’

Dr.
Fleischer did not smile. He reached for Ronald’s index card and wrote upon it.

Before
he departed Ronald’s brain was tested by a machine that was now familiar to
him, and which recorded the electric currents generated by his convulsions and
which was beginning to be used in the criminal courts of some American States
to ascertain the truth of a suspect’s statement, so that it was popularly
called ‘the truth machine’.

While
he was awaiting the convenience of the man who was to escort him back to
England, Ronald deliberately ignored the scene around him. His fellow-patients,
week by week, busied themselves with tennis, bed-making, toy-making, and their
jazz orchestra. It was only much later that these scenes, which he had made an
effort not to notice, returned to Ronald again and again accompanied by Dr.
Fleischer’s words — long after the specialist must have forgotten them — and
mostly at the moments when Ronald, bored by his self-preoccupation, most wished
to forget himself, clinics, hospitals, doctors, and all the pompous trappings
of his malady. It was at these moments of rejection that the obsessive images
of his early epileptic years bore down upon him and he felt himself to be, not
the amiable johnnie he had by then, for the sake of sheer good will and
protection from the world, affected to be — but as one possessed by a demon,
judged by the probing inquisitors of life, an unsatisfactory clinic-rat which
failed to respond to the right drug. In the course of time this experience
sharpened his wits, and privately looking round at his world of acquaintances,
he became, at certain tense moments, a truth-machine, under which his friends
took on the aspect of demon-hypocrites. But being a reasonable man, he allowed
these moods to pass over him, and in reality he rather liked his friends, and
gave them his best advice when, in the following years, they began to ask him
for it.

On his
return from California he was surprised to find himself able in some measure to
retain consciousness during his fits, although he could not control them, by a
secret, inarticulate method which, whenever he tried to describe it to his
doctors, began to fail him when next he practised it.

‘I find
it useful to induce within myself a sense,’ Ronald at first told his doctor, ‘—
when I am going under — a sense that every action in the world is temporarily
arrested for the duration of my fit—’

‘Seizure,’
said the doctor.

‘My
seizure,’ said Ronald, ‘and this curiously enables me to retain some sort of
consciousness during even the worst part. I find it easier to endure this
partial consciousness of my behaviour during the fits than surrender my senses
entirely, although it’s a painful experience.’

Immediately
he had said it, he felt foolish, he knew his explanation was inadequate. The
doctor remarked, ‘It’s as I’ve said. There is always an improvement in the
patient when he becomes used to his seizures. First he experiences the aura,
and this enables him to take preliminary precautions as to his physical safety
during the seizure. He learns to lie down on the floor in time. He learns…’

‘No,
that’s not what I mean,’ Ronald said. ‘What I mean is something different. It
is like being partly an onlooker during the fit, yet not quite…’

‘The
seizure,’ said the doctor, meanwhile puzzling his brains with a frown.

‘The
seizure,’ said Ronald.

‘Oh,
quite,’ said the doctor. ‘The patient might learn to exercise some control
during the petit-mal stage to stand him in good stead during the grand-mal
convulsions.

‘That’s
right,’ Ronald said, and went home and, on the way, had a severe fit in the
street; on which occasion his method would not work, so that he came to his
senses in the casualty department of St. George’s hospital, sick with
inhalations which had been administered to him to arrest his frenzy.

Soon
Ronald was obliged to earn his living. His father, a retired horticulturist,
still mourning the early death of his wife, took fright when he realised that
Ronald was incurable. Ronald reassured him, advised him to buy an annuity and
go to live at Kew; the father smiled and went.

Ronald
got a job in a small museum of graphology in the City, to which people of
various professions had recourse as well as curious members of the public. To
Ronald’s museum came criminologists from abroad, people wishing to identify the
dates of manuscripts, or the handwriting attached to documents of doubt. Some
came in the hope of obtaining ‘readings’ by which they meant a pronouncement as
to the character and future fortunes of the person responsible for a piece of
handwriting, but these were sent empty away. Ronald gained a reputation in the
detection of forgeries, and after about five years was occasionally consulted
by lawyers and criminal authorities, and several times was called to court as
witness for the defence or prosecution.

At the
museum he had a room to himself, with an understanding that he could there have
his fits in peace without anyone fussing along to his aid. He knew how to
compose himself for a fit. He cultivated his secret method of retaining some
self-awareness during his convulsions, and never mentioned this to his doctors
again, lest he should lose the gift. He kept by him a wedge of cork which he
stuck between his teeth as the first signs seized him. He knew how many seconds
it took to turn off the gas fire in his small office, to take the correct dose
of his pills, to lie flat on his back, turn his head to the side, biting his
cork wedge, and to await the onslaught. It was arranged, at these times, that
no-one entering Ronald’s office should touch him except in the event of blood
issuing from his mouth. Blood was never seen at his mouth, only foam, for Ronald
was careful with his cork wedge. His two old colleagues and the two young
clerks got used to him, and the typist, a large religious woman, ceased to try
to mother him.

After
five years Ronald’s fits occurred on an average of once a month. The drugs
which he took regularly, and in extra strength at the first intimations of his
fits, became gradually more effective in controlling his movements, but less
frequently could he ward off the violent stage of his attack until he found a
convenient place in which to lie down. Twice within fourteen years he was
arrested for drunkenness while staggering along the street towards a chemist’s
shop. Twice, he simply lay down on the pavement close in to the walls and
allowed himself to be removed by ambulance. As often as possible he travelled
by taxi or by a lift in a friend’s car.

The
porter of his flats had once found him, curled up and kicking violently, in the
lift, and Ronald had subsequently gone over the usual explanations in patient
parrot-like sequence. And, on these out-of-doors occasions, wherever they might
take place, Ronald would go home to bed and sleep for twelve to fourteen hours
at a stretch. But in latter years most of his fits occurred at home, in his room,
in his one-roomed flat in the Old Brompton Road; so that his friends came to
believe that he suffered less frequently than he actually did.

Ronald
had settled down to be an amiable fellow with a gangling appearance, slightly
hunched shoulders, slightly neglected-looking teeth and hair going prematurely
grey.

‘You
could marry,’ said his doctor.

‘I
couldn’t,’ Ronald said.

‘You
could have children. Direct inheritance is very rare. The risk is very slight.
You could marry. In fact, you ought’

‘I
couldn’t,’ Ronald said.

‘Wait
till you meet the right girl. The right girl can be very wonderful, very
understanding, when a fellow has a disability like yours. It’s a question of
meeting the right girl.’

Ronald
had met the right girl five years after his return from America. Her wonderful
understanding of his fits terrified him as much as her beauty moved him. She
was the English-born daughter of German refugees. She was brown, healthy,
shining, still in her teens and splendidly built. For two years she washed his
socks and darned them, counted his laundry, did his Saturday shopping, went
abroad with him, slept with him, went to the theatre with him.

‘I’m
perfectly capable of getting the theatre tickets,’ he said.

‘Don’t
worry, darling, I’ll get them in the lunch hour,’ she said.

‘Look, Hildegarde,
it isn’t necessary for you to mother me. I’m not an imbecile.’

‘I know
darling. You’re a genius.’

But in
any case the trouble between them had to do with handwriting. Hildegarde had
taken to studying the subject, the better to understand the graphologist in her
lover. Hildegarde took a short course, amazingly soaking up, by sheer power of
memory, the sort of facts which Ronald had no ability to memorise and which in
any case, if he was called upon to employ them, he would have felt obliged to
look up in reference books.

Thus
equipped, Hildegarde frequently aired her facts, her dates, her documentary
references.

‘You
have a better memory than mine,’ Ronald said one Sunday morning when they were
slopping about in their bedroom slippers in Ronald’s room.

‘I
shall be able to memorise for both of us,’ she said. And that very afternoon
she said, ‘Have you ever had ear trouble?’

‘Ear
trouble?’

‘Yes,
trouble with your ears?’

‘Only
as a child,’ he said. ‘Earache.’

She was
by his desk, looking down at some handwritten notes of his.

‘The
formation of your capital “I’s” denotes ear trouble,’ she said. ‘There are
signs, too, in the variations of the angles that you like to have your own way,
probably as the result of your mother’s early death and the insufficiency of
your father’s interest in you. The emotional rhythm is irregular, which means
that your behaviour is sometimes incomprehensible to those around you.’ She
laughed up at him. ‘And most of all, your handwriting shows that you’re a sort
of
genius.’

‘
Where did you get all this?’ Ronald said.

‘I’ve
read some text-books. There must be something in it — it’s a branch of
graphology, after all.’

‘Have
you practised interpreting various people’s characters from their handwriting,
and tested the results’ against experience?’

‘No,
not yet. I’ve only just read the books. I memorised everything.’

‘Your
memory is better than mine,’ Ronald said.

‘I’ll
be able to remember for us both.’

And he
thought, when we’re married, she’ll do everything for both of us. So that, when
he remonstrated against her obtaining the theatre tickets, and told her he
could perfectly well get them — ‘I’m not an imbecile’ — and she replied, ‘I
know, darling, you’re a genius’ — he decided to end the affair with this
admirable woman. For it was an indulgent and motherly tone of voice which told
him he was a genius, and he saw himself being cooked for, bought for, thought
for, provided for, and overwhelmed by her in the years to come. He saw, as in a
vision, himself coming round from his animal frenzy, his limbs still jerking
and the froth on his lips — and her shining brown eyes upon him, her
well-formed lips repeating as he woke such loving patronising lies as: ‘You’ll
be all right, darling. It’s just that you’re a genius.’ Which would indicate,
not her belief about his mental capacity but her secret belief in the
superiority of her own.

After
the affair had ended Ronald took to testing his memory lest it was failing him
as a result of his disease. On the Saturday morning when the small thin man,
Patrick Seton, had been pointed out to him in the café as one who was coming up
for committal on Tuesday, Ronald, having faintly felt a passing sense of
recognition, and left the café, and gone home, began once more to think of the
man. But Ronald could not recall him or anything to do with him. He wished he
had asked Martin Bowles the man’s name. In a vexed way, Ronald sorted out his
groceries, chucking them into their places in the cupboard. Then he went across
to the pub.

There,
drinking dark stout, were white-haired, dark-faced Walter Prett, art-critic,
who was looking at a diet sheet, Matthew Finch, with his colourful smile, and
black curly hair, London correspondent of the
Irish Echo,
and Ewart
Thornton, the dark, deep-voiced grammar-school master who was a Spiritualist.
These were bachelors of varying degrees of confirmation.