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By Root 1432 0

of women I suspect you are basically heterosexual,” and, later, “The truth, you know, isn’t black or white, it’s black and white. I keep a ceramic zebra on my mantelpiece to remind me of that,” but usually he said “Why?” or “Tell me more about that,” and Thaw felt no emotions toward him at all. He enjoyed the visits but returned to the ward feeling slightly anxious and flat, like an actor whose performance has been neither applauded nor booed. When able to walk he prolonged his return through the hospital grounds. The long low red-brick wards lay on the slopes of an airy hill. Seagulls were always circling overhead or perched on gables, perhaps because of stale bread flung out by the kitchens. There was a high red clock tower with a tinny chime, and all was gardened around with shrubberies, gravel paths and beds of bee-humming, dazzling, blue and scarlet flowers. It was a summer of extraordinary heat. Patients in dressing gowns walked carefully on the lawns or brooded on benches. Most of them were aging and solitary, and when white-clad nurses passed briskly in chattering couples and threes; Thaw was startled by the mercy of these bright young women caring for so many made lonely, feeble and repulsive by disease.

Each week his breathing improved for a few days, then worsened. Mr. Clark stopped smoking and calling for Agnes and lay perfectly still. The deep lines cut by experience were fading from his face; each day he was more like a young man though his eyes looked different ways and one side of his mouth opened in a grin while the other was firmly shut. Mr. McDade in the right-hand bed was aging. The hollows between the cords of his cheeks and neck grew deeper. He stared at passing doctors and nurses with unusually wide red-rimmed eyes. He spoke less to his wife and sons but often glanced toward Thaw, muttering, “Some … business … this … eh?”

He plainly wanted companionship in pain, but Thaw muttered “Aye” without looking up from scribbling. The notebook had become a neutral surface between the pain of the ward and the pain of breathing. He hated leaving it to feed or to sleep. At night, when a lamp shone on the nurses table far down the ward, enough gloaming filtered in from the summer sky to make a pale tablet of his page, and his hand continued shading enigmatic female heads, and grotesque male ones, and monsters that were part bird, part machinery, and huge cities mingling every style and century of architecture. After midnight he put the books aside and sat erect, clinging so tightly to consciousness that for many nights he thought himself sleepless. Then he noticed that though he heard the remote melancholy ding-dong of the clock tower sounding the quarters, they never seemed to sound the hour, and once he saw the two night nurses whispering near a corner bed, and then, without crossing the floor, one was reading a book at the central table and the other sat crocheting nearby. All night he was dipping in and out of sleep, but at such a shallow angle he never noticed. Sometimes he slept soundly and then waking was difficult, for it was hard at first to recognize the shapes and sounds of the ward and breathing was a vile science to be relearned by a lot of choking.

Late one night the nurse in charge led round a sister he had never seen before. They stopped at Mr. McDade’s bed. He was sleeping in the oxygen spectacles, his mouth continually gulping air and a sound like distant bagpipes coming from his chest. Below her stiff, white, sphinx-like cap the sister’s face looked keen and fiftyish. She said, “Poor McDade! God help him!” on a low note of such stern pity that warmth gushed in Thaw’s chest and he gazed at her lovingly. She moved to his bed-foot, smiled and said, “And how are you tonight, Duncan?”

He whispered, “Fine, thanks.”

“Would you like a cup of cocoa?”

“Very much, thanks.”

“You’ll see to it, nurse?”

They moved on and later the nurse brought sweet warm cocoa and two pink pills on a teaspoon.

He awoke in sunlight breathing easily amid the bright clangour of washbasins being passed round. For the first