The Laying on of Hands - Alan Bennett [39]
‘Dad,’ he said to himself.
‘Dad. It’s me, Denis.’
He put himself between the bed and the window so that if his father could see he would know he was there. He had read that stroke victims were never unconscious, just held incommunicado. ‘In the most solitary confinement,’ the article had said, the writer himself a doctor and too much taken with metaphor.
‘It’s all right, Dad.’
He took a chair and sat halfway down the bed, putting his hand over his father’s inert palm.
His father looked well in the face, which was ruddy and worn, the skin of his neck giving way sharply to the white of his body. The division between his known head and the unknown body had shocked Midgley when he had first seen it as a child, when his Dad took him swimming at the local baths. It was still the same. He had never sat in the sun all his life.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ said Midgley.
‘Are you next of kin?’ It was another nurse.
‘Son.’
‘Not too long then.’
‘Is the doctor around?’
‘Why? What do you want to know? There’s nothing wrong, is there? No complaints?’
‘I want to know how he is.’
‘He’s very poorly. You can see.’
She looked down at her left breast and lifted a watch.
‘Doctor’ll be round in about an hour. He’s very busy.’
‘I wonder where he is,’ said Aunty Kitty.
‘She said he was busy.’
They were back in the waiting room.
Aunty Kitty looked at him with what he imagined she imagined was a look of infinite sadness, mingled with pity (‘Sorrow and love flow mingling down’ came into his mind from the hymn). ‘Not the doctor, your dad, love. Behind that stare he’s somewhere, wandering. You know,’ she said vaguely, ‘in his mind. Where is he?’
She patted his hand.
‘I don’t suppose with having been to university you believe in an after-life. That’s always the first casualty.’
For a while she read the small print on her pension book and Midgley thought about his childhood. Nurses came and went, leading their own lives and a man wiped plastic-covered mattresses in the corridor. Every time a nurse came near he made remarks like ‘It’s all right for some’ or ‘No rest for the wicked.’ Once the matron glided silently by, majestic and serene on her electric trolley. ‘They’re a new departure,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘I could do with one of those. I’ll just pop and have another peep at your dad.’
‘What does that look on his face mean?’ she said when she came back. Midgley thought it meant he should have gone over to see him last Sunday. It meant that his dad had been right about him all along and now he was dying and whose fault was that? That was what it meant. ‘This unit was opened by the Duchess of Kent,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘They have a tip-top kidney department.’
The fascinations of medicine and royalty were equal in Aunty Kitty’s mind and whenever possible she found a connection between the two. Had she been told she was dying but from the same disease as a member of the Royal Family she would have died happy.
‘There’s some waiting done in hospitals,’ she said presently. ‘Ninety per cent of it’s waiting. Would you call this room oatmeal or cream?’
A young man came through, crying.
‘His wife was in an accident,’ Aunty Kitty explained. ‘One of those head-on crashes. The car was a write-off. Did you come in your van?’
Midgley nodded.
‘You’ll be one of these two-car families, then? Would you say she was black?’ A Thai nurse looked in briefly and went out again. ‘You don’t see that many of them. She’s happen a refugee.’
Midgley looked at his watch. It was an hour since he had spoken