Chapter Fourteen

The Park Lane Hospital for the Dying was a sixty-story tower. At the lift gates the porter gave Savage the information he required, and he dropped down to Ward 81 (a Galloping Senility ward, the porter explained) on the seventeenth floor.

It was a large room bright with sunshine and yellow paint, and containing twenty beds, all occupied. Linda was dying in company and with all the modern conveniences. The air was continuously alive with synthetic melodies. At the foot of every bed was a television box. It was left on from morning till night. “We try,” explained the nurse to the Savage, “we try to create a thoroughly pleasant atmosphere here.”

“Where is she?” asked the Savage, ignoring these polite explanations.

The nurse was offended. “You are in a hurry,” she said.

“Is there any hope?” he asked.

“You mean, of her not dying?” (He nodded.) “No, of course there isn’t. When somebody’s sent here, there’s no…” Startled by the expression of distress on his pale face, she stopped. “Why, whatever is the matter?” she asked.

He shook his head. “She’s my mother,” he said in a scarcely audible voice.

The nurse glanced at him with horrified eyes; then quickly looked away.

“Take me to her,” said the Savage, making an effort to speak in an ordinary tone.

She led the way down the ward. Young faces (for senility galloped so hard that it had no time to age the cheeks-only the heart and brain) turned as they passed. The Savage shuddered as he looked.

Linda was lying in the last of the long row of beds, next to the wall. She was watching the Semi-finals of the South American Riemann-Surface Tennis Championship. Linda looked on, vaguely and uncomprehendingly smiling. Her pale, bloated face wore an expression of imbecile happiness. Every now and then her eyelids closed, and for a few seconds she seemed to be dozing. Then with a little start she would wake up again.

“Well, I must go,” said the nurse. “I’ve got my batch of children coming. Besides, there’s Number 3.” She pointed up the ward. “Might go off any minute now. Well, make yourself comfortable.” She walked briskly away.

The Savage sat down beside the bed.

“Linda,” he whispered, taking her hand.

At the sound of her name, she turned. Her vague eyes brightened with recognition. She squeezed his hand, she smiled, her lips moved; then quite suddenly her head fell forward. She was asleep. He sat watching her-seeking through the tired flesh, seeking and finding that young, bright face which had stooped over his childhood in Malpais, remembering her voice, her movements, all the events of their life together. How beautiful her singing had been! And those childish rhymes, how magically strange and mysterious!

He felt the hot tears welling up behind his eyelids. And then the reading lessons. And long evenings by the fire or, in summertime, on the roof of the little house, when she told him those stories about the Other Place, outside the Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose memory, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by contact with the reality of the real London.

A sudden noise of shrill voices made him open his eyes and look round. A stream of identical eight-year-old male twins was pouring into the room. Twin after twin, twin after twin. Their uniform was khaki. They swarmed between the beds, clambered over, crawled under, peeped into the television boxes, made faces at the patients. Linda astonished and rather alarmed them. A group stood clustered at the foot of her bed, staring at her.

“Oh, look, look!” They spoke in low, scared voices. “Whatever is the matter with her? Why is she so fat?”

They had never seen a face like hers before. At forty-four, Linda seemed a monster of flaccid and distorted senility.

“Isn’t she awful?” came the whispered comments. “Look at her teeth!”

Suddenly from under the bed a twin popped up between John’s chair and the wall, and began peering into Linda’s sleeping face.

“I say…” he began; but the sentence ended prematurely in a squeal. The Savage took him by the collar, lifted him up sent him howling away.

His yells brought the Head Nurse hurrying to the rescue.

“What have you been doing to him?” she demanded fiercely. “I won’t have you striking the children.”

“Well then, keep them away from this bed.” The Savage’s voice was trembling with indignation. “What are these filthy little brats doing here at all? It’s disgraceful!”

“Disgraceful? But what do you mean? They’re being death-conditioned. And if interfere again, I’ll send for the porters to throw you out.”

The Savage rose to his feet and took a couple of steps towards her. His movements and the expression on his face were so menacing that the nurse fell back in terror. With a great effort he checked himself and, without speaking, turned away and sat down again by the bed.

Reassured, but still uncertain, “I’ve warned you,” said the nurse, “so mind.” Still, she led the twins away and made them join in the game of hunt-the-zipper at the other end of the room.

Linda had stirred uneasily, had opened her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely around, and then once more dropped off to sleep. Sitting beside her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. The beautiful memories refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies and uglinesses and miseries. Pope with the blood trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies buzzing round; and the boys calling those names as she passed… Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes and shook his head. He tried to think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him to sleep.

Linda stirred, woke up, stared for a few seconds at the television box, then, lifting her face, sniffed once or twice at the newly perfumed air and suddenly smiled.

“Pope!” she murmured, and closed her eyes. “Oh, I do so like it, I do…” She sighed and let herself sink back into the pillows.

“But, Linda!” The Savage spoke, “Don’t you know me?” He had tried so hard, had done his very best; why wouldn’t she allow him to forget? He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream to reality. “Don’t you know me, Linda?”

He felt the faint answering pressure of her hand. The tears started into his eyes. He bent over her and kissed her.

Her lips moved. “Pope!” she whispered again.

Anger suddenly boiled up in him.

“But I’m John!” he shouted. “I’m John!” And in his furious misery he actually caught her by the shoulder and shook her.

Linda’s eyes fluttered open; she saw him, knew him-“John!”-but situated the real face in an imaginary world. She knew him for John, her son, but thought he was an intruder into that paradisal Malpais where she had been spending her soma-holiday with Pope. He was angry because she liked Pope, he was shaking her because Pope was there in the bed-as though there were something wrong, as though all civilized people didn’t do the same. “Everyone belongs to every…” Her voice suddenly died. Her mouth fell open: she made a desperate effort to fill her lungs with air. But it was as though she had forgotten how to breathe.

The Savage was on his feet, bent over her. “What is it, Linda? What is it?”

The look she gave him was charged with an unspeakable terror-with terror and, it seemed to him, reproach. She tried to raise herself in bed, but fell back on to the pillows. Her face was horribly distorted, her lips blue.

The Savage turned and ran up the ward.

“Quick, quick!” he shouted. “Quick!”

The Head Nurse looked round. “Don’t shout! Think of the little ones,” she said, frowning. “You might decondition… But what are you doing? Be careful!”

“Quick, quick!” He caught her by the sleeve, dragged her after him. “Quick! Something’s happened. I’ve killed her.”

By the time they were back at the end of the ward Linda was dead.

The Savage stood for a moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside the bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably.

The nurse stood looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the twins who were staring from the other end of the ward. Should she speak to him? remind him of where he was? of what he might’ve done to these poor innocents? Undoing all their death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry-as though death were something terrible.

She stepped forward, she touched him on the shoulder. “Can’t you behave?” she said in a low, angry voice. Looking around, she saw that half a dozen twins were already on their feet and advancing down the ward.

“Now, who wants a chocolate eclair?” she asked in a loud, cheerful tone.

“Me!” yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely forgotten.

“Oh, God, God, God…” the Savage kept repeating to himself.

“Whatever is he saying?” said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill.

The Savage violently started and looked round. Five khaki twins, each with the stump of a long eclair in his right hand, were standing in a row, looking at him.

“Is she dead?” one of them asked.

The Savage stared at them for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.

“Is she dead?” repeated the inquisitive twin walking at his side.

The Savage looked down at him and still without speaking pushed him away. The twin fell on the floor and at once began to cry. The Savage did not even look round.