Over in the nook by the door several head-injured young men were sitting in front of the television, watching the only human pursuit dedicated to the infliction of head injuries: the two guys in the square ring, with the shiny shorts and the gumshields.
‘You’ve gone very quiet, Xan. I expect it’s a bit of a strain, putting a few simple words together.’
‘Oh I can talk all right.’
‘So you can. And don’t worry about the longer ones — you know, the ones with two or more syllables: they’ll come.’
In fairness to Pearl (and Xan, silently, within himself, had already made such a concession), it should be recorded that after reading about the attack she telephoned the hospital and screamed at various people, demanding, as the mother of Xan’s sons, a full and detailed diagnosis, which she got; and this she had passed on to her boys with the gentlest and most hopeful construction. Pearl was a good mother. She was not, perhaps, everybody’s automatic choice as an ex-wife. But she was a good mother.
‘The worst thing, they say — they say … The worst thing, they say, is what it does to your sex life.’
A woman, it has been observed (by a woman, two hundred years ago), is fine only for herself. Man is indifferent to nuance; and the only things another woman will respond gratefully to are obvious signs of poverty or bad taste. Pearl didn’t dress only for herself. She dressed for everyone — herself included. Today she wore a black leather jacket that squeaked and glistened, a snow-white cashmere sweater, and a pink flowered skirt of startling brevity (plus witchy ankle-high boots, also black, and flouncy little socks, also white). There was one more thing: one more thing she was wearing.
He had known Pearl, on and off, since infancy; and the lost world of their marriage (he had come to feel) was regressive or animalistic or even prehistoric — a land of lizards. There were things that, even today, he would never dare tell Russia. For instance, the fact that after twelve years together (years qualified by month-long silences, trial separations, separate holidays, frequent fistfights, and ceaseless adultery) their erotic life continued to improve — if improve is quite the word we want. Everything else was bottomlessly horrible, by the end: they had reached a state (as one of their counsellors put it) of ‘conjugal paranoia’. The two boys were long past going down on their knees and begging their parents to separate. It was not until Michael and David were well into their second and more serious hunger strike (eighty-four hours) that Xan and Pearl snapped out of it and called the lawyers. But throughout this period their erotic life continued to improve — or, to put it another way, continued to take up more and more of their time.
‘It can go either way,’ she said: ‘your sex life. Either you’re not interested — that’s what usually happens. Or else you’re interested in nothing else. Which d’you think it’s going to be?’
Xan waited.
‘Let’s do a little test. Ready?’
He knew what was coming, and he knew where he’d look. To fix it: Pearl O’Daniel was tall and lean (and wore her auburn hair short and spiky); her hips were narrow, but her thighs were widely set, splaying upwards and outwards from the knee; and it was in the space between her legs, in this triangular absence (the shape of a capital y), that her gravity-centre lay … Now one of the predicates of Pearl’s character was that she always went too far. Her greatest admirers would instantly admit it: she always went too far. Even in the company of those who themselves always went too far, she always went too far. And now, in St Mary’s, Pearl went too far. Uncrossing her thighs and crossing her ankles, she revealed this space, and Xan, still defeatedly low in the bed, contemplated it. His ex-wife, of course, had not committed the sexual illiteracy of wearing nothing, underneath: she was wearing something, and not just anything. He was familiar with it — pearly white, and studded with stars. On the morning of the day the decree nisi came through, Xan had had the whole thing in his mouth, while Pearl looked approvingly on.
‘Which is it?’ she asked. ‘All or nothing.’
‘Of the two, I don’t know, I’d have to say nothing.’
‘Well done, Xan. A long word: nothing. Ah. Here are the boys.’ She stood up and waved. Then from her fathomless tote-bag she removed a newspaper and stretched the page out at him: three photographs — Xan, Pearl, Russia. ‘She’s going to give you grief about this,’ she said.
As his sons approached, Xan made another effort to straighten himself against the rails behind his back. Again, with trembling hands, he rearranged the trembling wefts of his hair. The bed, the whole stall here, felt like a display-case of age and ruin, in ashtray colours … Michael and David took up position on either side of him. They regarded their father, not with solemnity, alarm or disappointment, but with acceptance; and immediately he took comfort from it.
David, the younger, kissed his cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
Michael, the elder, kissed his cheek and said, ‘Dad? Who were the fucking bastards who did this to you?’
‘Michael,’ said Pearl.
‘Well that’s it,’ said Xan, who remembered, pretty much. ‘You don’t remember.’
But he couldn’t remember the impact, nor the moments leading up to it. Tilda Quant had told him that there was a fear-centre in the brain, a dense knot of neurons deep inside either hemisphere and normally associated with the sense of smell. Here was the control tower of your horrors and hauntings. Sometimes the brain could suppress the most painful memories (and military scientists, she said, were trying to duplicate the effect with a devil-pill that would quell all qualms). So now his brain was protecting him from his memory. But he wanted the memory and constantly sought it out. He wanted the smell of the memory.
‘Never fear, boys. Soon I’m going to go out there’, he said (in a voice, in an accent, that even Pearl found hard to recognise), ‘and get them fucking dogs.’
Like somebody moving from one life to another, Russia walked along a tube of glass — one hundred feet above the road that separated the two sections of the hospital. She was leaving theory, now, and entering practice.
Her anxiety, her suspense, was currently devoted to a fit of slanderous detestation aimed at Natwar Gandhi — and at all doctors everywhere. As a student of twentieth-century history, she knew about the ‘chemistry’, as opposed to the ‘physics’, of the USSR’s interrogation teams, the vivisectionists of Japan; when, in 1941, the German doctors were given a free hand in their treatment of the infirm and the supposedly insane, the following phase became known as ‘wild euthanasia’. Doctoring talent — healing — danced closely with its opposite. Given the chance (it seemed), these pulse-taking, brow-fondling trundlers would be wrapping up children’s heads in old newspapers, and strolling about, in a collegiate spirit, with the packages under their arms.
All of which they did do. But Russia, now, was hating Dr Gandhi (her chest swelled, her nostrils broadened) for his refusal to protect her from any of her fears. The prognosis was good; still, he would rule nothing out. And the glint that came into his face when he described negative outcomes: the glint of relished life-power. Yes, he must get a lot of that, in Intensive Care. While he talked, Russia found herself imagining what his senses had been trained to tolerate — unspeakable textures, fantastic stenches. Nor, as she took her leave, could she spurn the consolation that this doctor, like most other doctors, would drop down dead within a week of his retirement. It was to do with power, and when that went, they went.