“The bathrooms are mixed. There are dirty old men walking around with their dressing gowns hanging open.”
For a second I thought she was referring to me and checked my fly.
“There are young women in hospital gowns you can see through if they stand by the windows. The doctors are all foreign. They’re OK, but they’re all from bloody India and half the nurses have trouble speaking English. They certainly don’t care about mixed wards. Well, I do. It’s an outrage. My husband has fallen in love with some young woman in the opposite bed. He’s out of his mind on drugs and can’t help himself. I’m here for him and he doesn’t even notice me anymore. The whole system is a disgrace.”
Chapter 18
Andréevich. Old Nik. It must be him, Walter’s old friend and adviser. He must be here in the hospital.
I had heard Nik had taken to the bottle recently and had tried his hand at hang gliding again in one last hurrah. In the crash he had broken both his ankles. I had shared a lot of this with Walter a few months before. We were both saddened to hear about it, but my feelings were mixed. Old Nik’s passing would stop the flow of new work, but the old work—much of which I controlled—might go up in value. Nik had intended the hang gliding escapade to be a glorious end. He had been ill with colon cancer that had spread to his prostate and his stomach. Physicians, who had somehow failed to get a true measure of the old man’s tenacious and audacious spirit, had given him several short life sentences. They provided Nik with a self-regulated morphine intravenous supplier, and he used it enthusiastically, reinvigorating his visions of angelic hosts harvesting the lost souls of the forthcoming apocalypse. The end, with no date, no time, no sun or moon, nor tide nor moment: Nik just saw it all coming.
I stood at a distance. I didn’t want Maud to see me. As Walter scribbled his name on the petition, Maud pressed his arm gratefully and was about to allow him to pass.
Then she took a careful look at him. “You’re Walter Karel Watts, aren’t you?” Her voice had lost its bullying edge. “My husband is Nik Andréevich,” she said. “Old Nik.”
“I realized,” Walter replied, shifting from foot to foot.
“Your old colleague Steve Hanson always tells me that my husband was your guru!”
She laughed then, and absurdly, by that erotic mechanism I seemed unable to control, I swooned a little at this woman whose face had so often touched my heart and triggered my loins.
She mentioned another link. “Louis Doxtader,” she added. “Your godfather, I think, is my husband’s agent. What an extraordinary coincidence.”
Walter nodded, and I turned my face away, hoping she wouldn’t recognize me and slow down our progress to Floss any further. Coincidences often happen in hospitals, which gather people up like railway stations and airports. We tend to run into old acquaintances in such places.
Maud was not so commonsensical. “No,” she corrected herself. “This is not a mere coincidence. It’s meant to be. It’s like a circle, and it’s closing. How wonderful. I’m Maud, by the way.”
I could maintain my distance no longer. “Hello, Maud,” I said, offering my hand. “I’ve brought Walter here to see his wife.”
Maud held out both hands and we each took one.
Then, suddenly looking her age, she broke down in tears. Walter moved to comfort her and hardly heard her confession as she fell into his arms and sobbed.
“I had his child,” she wept. “He never knew.”
Walter seemed not to register what she was saying. Probably all he could think of was Floss in a coma, after a stroke, perhaps disabled for life, having lost a child.
Walter allowed Maud to pull away from his arms slowly.
She looked to the floor.
“My husband,” she said, “is behaving absurdly. Wickedly, though he can’t help himself. He’s fallen in love with the young woman in the bed opposite his own. He’s refusing to die. It’s stubbornness.”
Maud turned her gaze on Walter.
“It’s so unfair,” she complained, wiping her eyes. “I’ve suffered with Nik for so long. I’ve put up with his crazy visions and his dangerous adventures. Now I can’t even watch him die with any dignity. Floss! What kind of a name is that?”
I watched as Walter gazed through the window of the locked door into the critical care ward and gasped with amazement. What we both saw was especially pleasing after Maud’s rant. Like most people, we thought the National Health Service had been in decline, and that this hospital in particular had suffered from lack of funds. However, the entire ward was modern, shining, and bustling with dozens of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and cleaners. Typically, there was no one at the reception desk outside the locked door, but people were going in and out using swipe cards, and we walked in with one of them who directed us toward a second reception desk inside the ward. That was unattended too. Everyone seemed to be busy.
Lots of staff were moving around purposefully, none of them giving us a second glance. We had no idea which way to turn, right or left. There was a central corridor with about six small wards branching off it, and a few isolation rooms with glass walls. Neither of us had ever experienced such a sense of positive activity in a hospital before. The last time I’d been in a hospital was to visit a friend who had had a knee operation and wanted to smoke a cigarette. We had had to go to a bleak, seedy area set aside for the purpose. It had been an unpleasant experience. But now Walter and I knew that we were looking at the very hub of this hospital, served by powerfully equipped operating rooms. The ordinary part of the hospital was probably much less impressive, and less intense. But this was all reassuring.
Suddenly, Walter seemed to stagger, losing his balance. I held his arm and steadied him.
He looked at me gratefully. His dizziness was caused not so much by panic as by relief. Floss could not be in a better place, whatever Maud Andréevich believed was so evil about mixed wards.
Just then Walter spied Maud at the end of the corridor, walking out of one of the side wards holding some towels. He went toward where he had seen her emerge. How would Floss be?
We reached the ward. There were six beds, five with occupants.
Floss was not there.
Walter had been certain that this was where he would find her, since Maud had said that Floss was in the bed opposite Old Nik’s. And there he was, wearing a pair of large headphones, sitting on the side of his bed, listening to something, rocking back and forth. It was shocking to see how much he had deteriorated. He was covered in dark chocolate-colored lesions all over his face and hands, and his teeth were black. Walter looked at the bed opposite and checked the chart.
Florence Watts. This is where she should be. Was she dead? Oh God. In surgery?
At that moment Nik Andréevich looked up and saw Walter’s face. The old man’s eyes were full of tears. He looked at Walter and slipped off the earphones. Walter could hear the music, an old New Orleans funeral anthem.
I went down to the St. James Infirmary, and I saw my baby there. She was stretched out on a long white table, so cold, and fine, and bare. Let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever she may be. She can search this world over, never find another man like me. When I die, oh Lord, please bury me in my high-top Stetson hat. Put gold coins over my eyelids, so the boys will know I died standing pat. Get six crap-shooting pallbearers, six chorus girls to sing me a song. Put a jazz band behind my hearse to raise hell as we roll along. Get sixteen coal-black horses, to pull that rubber-tired hack. There’re thirteen men going to the graveyard, only twelve are coming back. Suddenly, the music leaps up a hundred notches, a full classical orchestra follows the rhythm of a huge orchestral bass drum, booming slowly and funereally. Let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever she may be. She can search this world over, never find another man like me. With every repeat of the two lines the singers become more celebratory. The lead male voice becomes more and more arrogant and bragging, more grandiose, more self-assured. Soon there are thousands of them. A massive choir, straight out of Mahler. A huge organ. The music shakes the world. An old man laughs. A young girl sings, upward, away.