Umbrella (53 page)

wallpapering of autodidacticism
. There are degrees in German, divinity, economics, philosophy, law, modern history, comparative religion, mathematics, several different languages, ancient history, physics, politics, geography, and so on
ad tedium
. Obviously, Busner thinks, he has suffered for his learning – and it’s now our turn. Sir Albert says: I only ever had forty-two minutes a day to study. Busner starts: I’m sorry –? Sir Albert has regained his colourless composure and continues: Twenty-one minutes each morning on the train from Blackheath to Charing Cross, then a second twenty-one minutes during the evening commute – this was all I had available to me for study – so you see, all of  ’em are extramural degrees from London University. In my day it was, of course, quite unthinkable for a young man of my class background to read for an ordinary degree – I joined the civil service when I was eighteen, but you knew that. I was supporting both my parents and a younger imbecilic sister by the time I was twenty-two – I was in charge of Shell Production at the Arsenal eight years subsequent to that. After my notably feckless sister had her nervous collapse – in this very room, as it happens – I cannot say that I made any great moves to assist her. She blamed me, y’know, for the death of our brother, she took the – in my view doubly indefensible – position that, as the official responsible for manufacturing the ordnance used during the offensive in which he died, I should’ve both been aware of the high proportion of dud shells being sent to the Front, and moved to rectify this. As it was, many of them either exploded prematurely, inflicting casualties among the attacking British forces, or failed to detonate on impact and thus proved inutile when it came to the destruction of the German’s Drahtverhau –. Pardon? Busner interjects. Sir Albert sighs again: Khhhherrr . . . their barbed-wire entanglements, young man, as a Jew of German extraction I’d’ve expected you to have at least a rudimentary vocabulary. Anyway, you haven’t interrupted my flow, that is all there is to say on the matter. Busner does some of his own cogitating before he speaks, then he adopts his most professionally conciliatory tone: Surely, Sir Albert, after so many years have passed, you can find it in you to forgive her? This was a young woman, who, whatever she may’ve said at the time, was almost certainly beginning to be affected by the pathological inflammation of her brain tissue – and besides . . . after so very long . . . He falters and then stops altogether, for Sir Albert’s colour is deepening to an angry choler,
You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor
. . . rings down the decades into the old man’s ears, together with the tintinnabulation of his own self-improved hearing aid. You have not been listening to me, Doctor Busner! he barks, I said that I found my sister’s position doubly indefensible. It is not that I cannot forgive her for her outrageous slandering of my public service: on the contrary, I was perfectly well aware at the time of the defectiveness of much of the ordnance, aware also of its almost complete ineffectiveness when it was used in the bombardment of well-established and deeply entrenched positions. Doctor Busner, I did not study law, or philosophy, or indeed comparative religion for all those three hundred and seventy-two thousand, nine hundred and sixty minutes without coming to a fine understanding of the nature of moral responsibility and blame. I have made my peace with myself – and am prepared also to make it with my Maker – and when it comes to my conduct during those years I may be allowed many things: my obvious youth, the temper of the times, the war frenzy that gripped the general populace and that amounted to – an apposite expression from your own usually fuzzy professional terminology – group-think. Although, let me be clear: I do not forgive my younger self on the basis of any specious relativism – regardless of place or time, before God some acts will always be wrong – but there was much mitigation. Whether such mitigation can be applied to my sister’s own conduct, I very much doubt: a self-professed pacifist, she willingly became a vital component in the engine of war. A socialistic collectivist, she yet felt free to deliver the damning judgements that only behove an individual. A violent advocate of women’s rights and suffrage, she nonetheless chose, quixotically, to set aside her convictions in the belief that Omnia vincit amor. As to your argument that she was already suffering with encephalitis lethargica at the time of our brother’s death, this is simply not borne out by the facts. I have read Constantin von Economo’s original paper on the disease – something that you, with your limited capacity for languages, cannot have done – and while he first identified the pathology in Vienna in 1916, cases were not recognised in England until early 1918 – indeed, the paper published in the Lancet that first drew the attention of the authorities to the potential wastage of manpower implied by this epidemic appeared only in April – the twentieth, if my memory still serves me. No, when my sister was working at the Arsenal, turning the fuse caps of shells, then filling and packing those shells, she was as physically sound as any of her fellow workers, workers who, it may please you to learn, had significantly better occupational health than those in comparable peacetime industries – a matter on which the statistics, should you care to consult the relevant papers, will certainly bear me out. No, Audrey’s attitude was doubly indefensible, Doctor Busner, because if anyone could be said to be to blame for Lance-Corporal Stanley Death’s death – which, so far as we can judge, was indeed the result of a premature shell detonation, given the location in which his remains were eventually discovered, in 1928 – then it was she and her fellow munitions workers, whose lackadaisical and generally inefficient approach to their duties at times bordered on criminal negligence. So, you perceive the impasse, Doctor Busner: it is not that I cannot forgive her for blaming me – a resentment that, given her long period of mental inanition, I daresay has been significantly attenuated – but rather that it is I, remaining in complete and continuous possession of all my faculties, who have blamed her for every single one of the intervening twenty thousand and ninety-three days since our brother was killed – including this one. Therefore, whatever the circumstances under which she is currently detained, it is unthinkable that I should have any contact with her, while as to visiting her at the hospital, that is absolutely out of the question. And now, Doctor Busner, I believe what professional business we have with one another is concluded. I might, were yours a social visit, ask you remain a while and take another cup of tea. It is – he gestures towards the set – mine and Missus Haines’s usual practice to watch a television programme at this time – this evening we are both looking forward to the Two Ronnies. However, for reasons I’ve already made crystal clear, yours is not – nor could ever be – a social visit, and therefore you would oblige me by leaving post-haste.

But he did come
. Standing on the pavement, looking up at the
most insane thing I’ve seen all day
, a hoarding upon which is inscribed the slogan
LIVE YOUR LIFE IN LUXURY
AT PRINCESS PARK MANOR
, beside the further selling point:
HEALTH CLUB OPEN TO NON
-RESIDENTS
, Busner recalls the afternoon in August 1971 when Sir Albert De’Ath walked unannounced on to Ward 20 of Friern Hospital. Busner didn’t think to ask the old man what had had changed his massive and inertial Mind, because at the time, with his own departure for Spain only days away, the psychiatrist was altogether preoccupied by the increasing instability of his small cohort of post-encephalitics. — The hoarding is separated by wavy lines into three sections, the right-hand one features a luridly blue-and-green photograph cropped so as to include only the tree-fringed central section of the façade: its disproportionately elongated dome, a single campanile, and the arched portico, make of the former lunatic asylum
a plausible manor, if, that is you have no memory
. . .
In the second section a young man in a shiny black singlet stares determinedly ahead, his muscular arms cocked so that his clenched fists repose by his bulging pectorals. From his earphones and their bridle of cable, as much as the blurry young woman in the background in shorts and on an exercise machine, Busner deduces that this must be the health club open to non-residents – while the third section, which features, shot from above, the top half of a lunging swim-suited figure dappled by a leprosy of chlorinated water, must, he assumes, be an image of the fully equipped indoor swimming pool. He continues to stand, caught in
a crisis of fixed regard
by the hoarding, its marketing buzz-line,
Award-winning individually designed quality apartments set in
30
acres of stunning parkland
, sawing into his skull, along with:
Live your life in luxury at Princess Park Manor
. . .
Princess Park!
The Park bit, he concedes, has a blunt topographic plausibility, but Princess? What could possibly account for this renaming other than an impulse to mythologise of Hitlerian proportions –
did they have no idea of what went on here!
Princess evokes, he supposes, sleeping beauties, snuggled up in their quality apartments beneath clean duvets, awaiting only the kiss of a handsome prince in a shiny black singlet to awaken them to another day in the fitness suite, with its wide variety of studio classes and personal training –
not forgetting the health and beauty spa!
— There had been no beauty and precious little health that day. As Busner had led Sir Albert through the grotty day-room and into the female dormitory, Mboya, Inglis, Vail – the names came back to him now – had waylaid him one after another: Mister Ostereich was having another respiratory crisis, should they give him a further twenty milligrammes of intravenous Benadryl? Helene Yudkin’s opisthotonos had recurred – if she could stand at all, she bent back and back so far that she fell over, should they administer Symmetrel as a partial agonist to the L-DOPA? And Leticia Gross – they had whispered her name, although the bellowing of the woman-mountain resounded lustily through the ward – is terrified, would he give her an injection of some kind? Largactil – or Valium? Sir Albert had been altogether unaffected by the tumult: erect and severe in an unlikely suit of black-and-white houndstooth cheque, he was wearing just the one pair of spectacles and a single hearing aid. I have come to visit my sister, he had said to Busner when they encountered one another by the nurses’ station –
and that was that
. All Busner had hoped for was that his sister would be as unaffected by the trouble as he was – for that’s what Busner chose to think of it as:
a little
trouble
, nothing to be concerned about – simply side-effects of the L-DOPA that could be managed with the right complementary drugs. They would titrate the doses differently, use phenothiazine and butyrophenone as buffers –
put up the umbrella
as much as the nurses required, but at all costs keep on with the trial
that’s nothing of the sort
. . .
—
Glancing back to make sure that the old man is still following him, Busner looks into first one embayment, then the next, worried at what he may see: the bluing face of a post-encephalitic holding his breath . . .
’til he bursts
, or the tongue of another poking out uncontrollably to catch
flies that for once aren’t there
. . .
the eyes of a third battened on to a corner of the ward,
entranced by a cobweb
. . .
In his growling guts Busner knows that things are going badly wrong – has known it since shortly after the outing to Alexandra Palace: together with Mboya he has already tried cutting the enkies’ L-DOPA, increasing it, administering it in smaller doses – but whatever they do the ghastly symptoms of the malady re-emerge . . .
bones ploughed up from a battlefield
. And in his calmer, more analytic moments he understands this: that these are no side-effects at all, but simply the total refutation of what he has fervently wanted to believe: that far from orderly health being fundamental to the human condition, it is chaotic disease that howls through the enkies’ cellular caverns, and screeches between the manifold branches of their brainstems. He blames Whitcomb for this – if only
the bloody man
wasn’t so fixated on what he terms the Bottom Line – a penny-pinching and mercenary limitation that Busner envisions as a limbo-dancer’s pole, beneath which the consultant
bends back . . . and back
. . .
the flaps of his white coat dragging in the . . .
dirt of his own fucking making!
Staff numbers have been cut throughout the hospital, the Occupational Therapy Department half closed – and the effects on all the patients are already evident, but especially on the chronic ones: they slump about the rundown wards with still more of nothing to do, their state-underfunded skins sagging into their donated clothing, their sad eyes filmed with two parts of chlorpromazine to one of . . .
neglect
.