Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [104]
whom I saw anything were a man called Stitch, who was a sort of resident head-porter, who was very stupid and hated me heartily, and one or two ward maids who were more or less semi-deficient. Every day at lunch time I would buy sandwiches at the Transept Canteen and then go and fetch Mars from Dave's flat: sometimes then I would catch a glimpse of Dave, from whose face the astonishment that had appeared there when I had first told him of my job had not yet completely faded; and I would tell myself that the whole thing would have been well worth it even if it were only for the sake of giving Dave such a jolt. Then I would return with Mars to sit in the garden outside Corelli I and eat my sandwiches. The garden here consisted of a long smooth lawn with two rows of cherry trees planted in the grass. I knew they were cherry trees because the nurses were always exclaiming about what the garden looked like in the spring. I would sit under one of the trees, while Mars bounded about close by, giving his attention now to one tree and now to another, and the young nurses of Corelli would come and gather round me like nymphs and laugh at me and say that I looked like a wise man sitting cross-legged under my tree, and admire Mars and make much of him, and defend me against Stitch, who would have liked to have forbidden me to have Mars in the garden at all. I enjoyed these lunch times. It was in the afternoon that I managed at last to see something of the patients. But this wasn't until the later afternoon. I looked forward to this all day. In my apprehension of it, the Hospital declined through a scale of decreasing degrees of reality in proportion to the distance away from the patients. They were the centre to which all else was peripheral. The patients in Corelli were all men, and all in a variety of conditions resulting from blows on the head. Some of them had concussion with or without fractured skulls and others had more mysterious capital ailments. They lay there with their turbans of white bandages and their eyes narrowed with headache, and watched me as I mopped the floor; and I felt for them a mixture of pity and awe, such as an Indian might feel for a sacred animal. I should have liked to have talked to them, and once or twice I did begin a conversation, but on each occasion one of the Sisters came and stopped it. It was felt to be improper for orderlies to address patients. What contributed yet more to the numinous aura with which the patients were surrounded was the fact that although I was close to them all the day I never saw them except in their full dignity of sick people, lying there solitary and silent with idle hands, privately communing with their pain. That at other times they were washed and fed, used bed pans, and had bloody and pus-soaked dressings removed from their shaven heads, I knew only at second hand by inference from the dirty dishes and other less savoury objects which entered more directly into my day's work. When the nurses and doctors were engaged on their priest-like tasks the doors of the rooms were religiously closed and notices displayed forbidding entrance. It was only occasionally that I would pass in the corridor one of the patients being wheeled to or from his bed on a trolley; and whenever I heard the dull rumble of the trolley wheels, with a heavy sound of rubber on rubber, I would contrive to emerge from wherever I was and catch a glimpse perhaps of some new arrival, whose face and newly bandaged head, still fresh with astonishment from the outside world, would convince me that after all the patients were men like myself. After I had cleaned the rooms there was an interval in my work, during which I would retire into my cubby hole where there is just room to sit, and read the evening papers by a dim electric light. There was no window in the cubby hole, and as all the walls were covered with people's coats hanging on pegs, it was rather like the inside of a wardrobe. I didn't mind this, as the insides of wardrobes have always had, since childhood, a peculiar fascination for me, no doubt