‘Well, let’s get on now.’
They left the office and turned into the main room behind the screens. It was a large room. Down the centre were ranged, practically touching each other, white iron beds, with only a small enough space between each to house a little table, and room for the occupant to remove himself.
Titus could see that some of the beds were occupied, while others had been made and were empty. At the end of the room, in a large alcove, were chairs of every description, some with restraining bars, which formed a circle at the wall’s edge. Most of the chairs were occupied by dormant human beings. The lack of animation was the most noticeable aspect. Not even the eyes showed any sign of life. Each man was an island. Each island was too remote to link with any other. Mist, fog, a moonless night separated island from island, and the vegetation, which at one time might have been receptive to cultivation, was barren; no future could be seen, even if it had been possible to coax the tiniest particle of life into being.
But among these sad remnants, who were still, there were some who could not stop moving. One stood in a corner of the room, jumping up and down with the tirelessness of a child and with as little purpose. Another, obsessed by perpetual motion, walked at great speed round and round the ward and, if the french windows on to the garden were open, made his lolloping way anticlockwise, passing little groups moving with the help of male nurses at the pace of a tortoise.
Titus noticed one man, who shiftily walked up the ward and drank from the bottles beside any occupied bed.
Peregrine showed him what his tasks would be. Titus had never had very much to do with children, and his own childhood, which had been unlike any other, gave him very little clue as to how a child’s mind worked. He imagined that these men he now saw had entered the second stage of juvenilia, but the resemblance ended there, as he was to learn later.
The duties Titus was to undertake were menial. The washing and shaving of those whose limbs or faculties were beyond such a daily exercise. Dressing and undressing those who could not or would not help themselves. Feeding others who had no fancy to eat, or if they had, were not capable of doing so, so that their clothes gave off a sickly odour from the food that had been dropped. In two or three of the beds, Titus was told, were men, old soldiers who had been in them for nearly fifty years, their young manhood smothered for ever by a gas that had taken the whole sweetness of life from them, in a war forgotten by nearly everyone. Another man, upright like a soldier, stood all day issuing commands to a ghost platoon. Unlike the others, he was clean and almost as young looking as on the day that whatever had happened to stultify his hopes and expectations had happened. Only he, among these lonely men, seemed happy and carefree in his own isolated world.
The days went by with a lack of hope and very little laughter, but Titus found friendship with the other men who worked with him. There seemed to be no world outside, and he confined himself to what he had to do. To think of what he was doing was at this time mentally beyond him, for strong as he was, by the end of each day he was physically exhausted. But later in his life he was to ask himself the reasons, to try to discover if there was anyone to blame for such meaningless destruction of so many human beings. He was nauseated by a great deal of what he had to do; to see the loss of dignity in men who at one time had been both loved and desired.
One day a man was brought to the ward on a stretcher and put to bed. He had been drugged to quieten him. His wife had come with him, and Titus watched as she brought out from a suitcase some books and pencils, some food and a few clothes, which she put in the small cupboard by the side of the bed.
There was something in the man that drew Titus to him, although he was in a deep, drugged sleep, and as she left to go the wife turned to him and said, ‘Look after him, please. I will be down in two days’ time.’
29
Intimations of Other Days
THE DAILY DUTIES could never cease. If some catastrophe had razed this building to the ground, with all its inmates in it, would it have mattered? But was it any more pointless than most of man’s pursuits? The line between sanity and the loss of sentience became daily too perplexing for Titus to reach any conclusion, yet each day he helped to keep alive beings who hardly knew they were alive; and others who, knowing, did not wish it. Nevertheless, apart from one or two of the really unlovable among them, he was drawn to them by an indefinable feeling. A feeling that he had thought had died in him many years ago: compassion and protectiveness towards people from whom he neither wished nor expected to receive gratitude, and he knew that if there were ever any situation where there was a choice of leaving them to their fate, or saving their living bodies, he would save them, but no rational thought could explain this reasoning.
He had been told that the man who had been brought in some days before was an artist, and no one knew what was the matter with him. Titus remembered the pleading way in which the man’s wife had asked him to look after her husband. When the effect of the drugs had worn off and with difficulty he sat up in his bed, one of the most pitiful sounds that Titus had ever heard almost rent the ward in two. A cry of despair. It belonged to neither man nor beast. It had in it all the pain that man has suffered since time began. It was so basic that it affected everyone, both staff and inmates, with an unnamed fear – such as the animal world feels before a natural disaster. The cries could not be alleviated by soothing words, or gentle persuasion. It was the soul and the heart of all humanity, pleading to whatever God there was for release.
The only release that was possible was an injection to quieten and deaden his consciousness and, being too frail to ward off the needle, he crumpled back on to the bed and slept, a heavy disturbed sleep.
The whole ward was in a turmoil, and it took Peregrine and Titus and two or three other men to calm it as best they could.
After the lunches were over, what few visitors ever came were allowed in.
At two o’clock the bell rang in the locked ward and the door was opened. The artist’s wife walked towards her husband’s bed. He was still in his uneasy sleep. There was so little room that there was nowhere to sit except perched at the end of the bed. She put some things she had brought on the table and sat, looking at her husband with a look of longing, a palpable aching.
‘How is he?’ she asked, knowing that no one could say anything that could assuage so deep an affliction. Why or how should they, when surrounded by such an abundance of human disarray?
There was nothing for her to do but await his uneasy reawakening. The bell rang again, and an elderly woman walked the length of the bed-scape to the bed next to her husband, where an old man, sunken in cheek and jaw, lay dying. Another wife, another life. Each person, alienated in his own prison. This elderly visitor had taken on the unseeing eyes of those around her. She had no hope for the future, only a past that no one could share with her, her own husband included. She was not new to this world, as she sat upon a small stool by the bed. From time to time an emaciated hand struggled from the bedclothes and reached for an answering hand, and the smallest whisper emerged, and as the old woman touched his fingers, the artist’s wife could just hear an echo from a world of years and years ago. ‘Hold my hand, mother . . . mother . . . hold my hand,’ then a rattle so faint as almost not to be heard, as the life in the bed floated away unobserved.
The only difference it made in the huge room was the arrival of a screen that now separated the quick (if that were not an exaggeration) from the dead.