Seldom pondered my question much more seriously than I’d expected.
“No, I don’t,” he said at last. “I just think he’ll try to be more…imperceptible, as we said before. Are you free at all now?” he asked, glancing at the dining room clock. “Visiting hours at the Radcliffe are about to start, and I’m heading there. If you’d like to come along, there’s someone there I’d like you to meet.”
Eight
We went out through the gallery of stone arches at the back of the college. Seldom showed me the sixteenth-century Royal Tennis Court on which Edward VII played, which reminded me of a pelota court. We crossed the road and turned down what looked like a cleft between two buildings, as if a sword had miraculously sliced through the stone from top to bottom with a single long blow.
“This is a short cut,” said Seldom.
He walked fast, slightly ahead of me because there wasn’t room for both of us in the passageway. We emerged on to a path along the river.
“I hope you don’t find hospitals too intimidating,” he said. “The Radcliffe can be a little depressing. The building has seven floors. Perhaps you’ve heard of an Italian writer, Dino Buzzati? He wrote a story called exactly that, ‘Seven Floors’, based on something that happened to him when he was here in Oxford to give a lecture. He describes the experience in one of his travel diaries. It was a very hot day and, as he came out of the lecture hall, he fainted briefly. As a precaution, the organisers insisted he be checked out at the Radcliffe. He was taken up to the seventh floor, the floor reserved for minor cases and general check-ups. They examined him and carried out a few tests. They told him everything looked fine but they wanted to do some more specialised tests, just in case. For that, they had to take him down a floor; meanwhile, his hosts could wait for him upstairs. He was taken down in a wheelchair, which he found a little excessive, but he decided to put it down to British zeal. Along the corridors and in the waiting rooms on the sixth floor, he saw people with burnt faces, people wrapped in bandages, lying on trolleys, blind, mutilated. He himself was made to lie on a trolley while he was X-rayed. He was about to sit up when the radiologist said they’d detected a small anomaly-probably nothing serious, but he should remain lying down until they got the results of the other tests. He’d have to be kept under observation for a few more hours, so he’d be taken down to the fifth floor, where he could have a room to himself.
“On the fifth floor the corridors were empty but a few doors were ajar. Inside one of the rooms he glimpsed people lying in bed, arms connected to drips. He was left alone in a room, on a trolley, growing increasingly alarmed, for several hours. At last, a nurse came in, carrying a little tray containing a pair of scissors. She’d come to cut off some of the hair from the back of his head, on the instructions of a doctor on the fourth floor, Dr X, who would be carrying out the final examination. As his hair fell into the little tray, Buzzati asked if the doctor would be coming up to see him. The nurse smiled, as if only a foreigner could have thought such a thing, and said that the doctors preferred to remain on their own floors. But she would take him downstairs herself and leave him waiting beside a window. The building is U-shaped and, looking down from the window on the fourth floor, Buzzati could see the blinds at the first-floor windows which he describes in his short story. Some of the blinds were up, but most were pulled down. He asked the nurse who was on the first floor and she gave him the reply that he reproduces in the story: only the priest worked down on that floor. Buzzati writes that during the dreadful hour that he spent waiting for the doctor, he became obsessed with a mathematical idea. He realised that the fourth floor was exactly halfway in the countdown from 7 to 1 and, out of superstitious terror, he was convinced that if he went down one more floor, everything would be lost. Intermittently, from the floor below, he could hear what sounded like the desperate cries of someone delirious with pain and grief. It was as if the screams were creeping up the lift shaft. Buzzati decided to resist with all his might if they came up with any excuses for taking him down another floor.
“The doctor arrived at last. It wasn’t Dr X but Dr Y, the consultant. He could speak a little Italian and he knew Buzzati’s work. He took a quick look at the test results and the X-rays and expressed surprise that his young colleague, Dr X, should have given instructions to cut Buzzati’s hair. Perhaps, said Dr Y, he was considering a preventive puncture. Anyway, it wouldn’t be necessary. Everything was absolutely fine. The doctor apologised and said he hoped that Buzzati hadn’t been too upset by the man screaming on the floor below. He was the only survivor of a car accident. The third floor could be very noisy, the doctor told him, a lot of the nurses down there used earplugs. But they would probably soon be taking the poor man down to the second floor and things would be quiet again.”
Seldom nodded towards the large, dark brick form that now rose before us. He went on, as if struggling to finish the story in the same calm, measured tone: “The entry in Buzzati’s diary is dated 27 June 1967, two days after the car crash in which I lost my wife, the crash in which John and Sarah died. The man in agony on the third floor was me.”
Nine
We mounted the stone steps at the entrance in silence. Inside, we crossed a large hall. Seldom greeted almost all the doctors and nurses we passed in the corridors.
“I spent almost two years in here,” he said. “And I had to come back every week for a whole year after that. Sometimes I still wake in the middle of the night thinking I’m back in one of the wards.” He indicated a bend in the corridor from which rose the worn steps of a spiral staircase. “We’re going to the second floor,” he said. “It’s quicker this way.”
On the second floor we walked down a long, bright corridor in which a deep, hushed silence reigned, as in a cathedral, and our steps echoed dismally. The floors looked as if they had just been polished, and shone as if few people ever walked across them.
“The nurses call this the Fish Tank, or the Vegetarian Section,” said Seldom, pushing open the swing doors to one of the wards.
There were two rows of beds, with far too little space between them, as in a field hospital. In each bed there was a body of which you could see only the head, connected to an artificial respirator. The combined sound of the respirators was a deep, restful gurgling, which really did make you think of an underwater world. As we walked down the aisle between the rows of beds I noticed that a bag collecting faeces hung from the side of each body. Bodies, I reflected, reduced to nothing more than orifices. Seldom caught my expression.
“Once, I woke up in the night,” he whispered, “and I heard two nurses, who’d been on duty in this ward, whispering about the ‘dirty ones’ who filled their bags twice a day, so the nurses had the extra job of changing them again in the afternoon. Whatever their state, ‘dirty ones’ don’t last long on the ward. Their condition somehow always deteriorates slightly and they have to be transferred elsewhere. Welcome to the land of Florence Nightingale. The medical staff enjoy almost complete impunity because relatives rarely get this far-they visit once or twice in the beginning, then they disappear. It’s like a warehouse. A lot of these patients have been on respirators for years. I try to get here every afternoon because, unfortunately, Frankie has recently become a ‘dirty one’ and I wouldn’t want anything strange to happen to him.”
We stopped by one of the beds. The man, or what remained of the man lying there, was a skull with a few grey hairs straggling over the ears and an impressively swollen vein at the temple. The body beneath the sheets had wasted away, making the bed seem far too big, and I suspected he might not have any legs. The thin white sheet hardly moved over his chest and, though the wings of his nose quivered, no breath misted the plastic mask over his face. One arm lay outside the sheet, connected by a copper fastening to what I thought at first must be a machine monitoring his pulse. In fact it was a device which held the arm in place over a notepad. A short pencil was attached rather ingeniously between the thumb and index fingers. But the hand, with very long nails, lay limp and lifeless on the sheet of white paper.