Eating People is Wrong (34 page)

‘If you can run this hospital any better than we can . . .’ said the nurse. She went away, and Treece reflected that he was really not the type to be in hospital, it was obvious. In
two hours he had got himself universally detested. He saw another nurse and signalled her. ‘What have I got and how long will I be here and can you get a message out for me?’ he
asked.

‘How should I know?’ asked the nurse, and went away again.

The staff nurse went by again. ‘Please,’ said Treece, trying a different tack. ‘May I talk to you for a minute?’

‘This isn’t a tea-party,’ said the nurse.

Treece lay still for a few hours. Someone brought him some hot milk, and later a meal. He moped. He worried about his evening class. He worried about the lectures he was missing. He did not
think that anyone knew where he was. There were about thirty people in the ward, in beds ranged on each side down the wall. They stared at him with unbridled curiosity. Someone came round and asked
him if he wanted to bet on the races that afternoon. There was a loudspeaker blaring forth the Light Programme. They kept playing ‘I was a Big Man Yesterday’, a tune that Treece
particularly disliked.

‘Eighoop, youth,’ said the man in the next bed. ‘Eighoop.’

‘Who?’ said Treece. ‘Me?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘What are’t tha in for?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Treece. ‘They didn’t tell me.’

‘I thowt tha looked ill when tha was browt in,’ said the man. ‘I’ve been left for dead twice.’

‘I see,’ said Treece.

At Treece’s other side was an old man who now cried: ‘Mester, grab a hold of this.’ He took a urine bottle out from under the covers and passed it to Treece. ‘I
can’t reach the floor.’

‘Where shall I put it?’ asked Treece.

‘Down there on t’ground,’ said the old man. Treece leaned out and two nurses sprang up from nowhere and pushed him back again. ‘I thought you were on complete
rest,’ said the strong-willed staff nurse.

In the evening, before supper, the young doctor whom Treece had seen first came round. ‘Don’t open your mouth,’ whispered the man in the next bed, ‘or he’ll make
tha have all thy teeth out.’ When the doctor arrived at Treece, he said to the sister, who accompanied him: ‘I never saw anything like it in all my puff; he marched in here and started
talking about God and wouldn’t admit he was ill at all.’ The sister laughed. ‘May I have a word with you?’ asked Treece.

‘What is it?’

‘Could you simply tell me what’s wrong with me, and let someone know where I am?’

‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t simply tell you what’s wrong with you, and if I did you probably wouldn’t understand, but what it amounts to is that you appear to have
some sort of ulceration in the stomach or the duodenum and might have another haemorrhage at any time. We’re going to give you some tests and X-rays and get a specialist to look at you. If
you tell the sister whom you want informed, she’ll see to it. Has he had a blood test?’

‘Yes,’ said the sister.

‘I think we’ll give him some blood then, as soon as possible.’

Something about the manner of both doctors and nurses puzzled Treece, but after a while he began to discern what it was. It became more and more apparent to him that apart from himself all the
persons in the ward were working class, and not expectant of deference. Moreover, they were given to asking just such questions as Treece had asked, as anyone would ask, but they were not able to
understand the answers. The need to convert all that was said into fairly simple terms had created a special kind of relationship, such as that which exists between parents and children, or the
sane and the insane, a talking down on one side and a deference on the other. In the world of illness all were lost except those who worked here. This situation, which was not unacceptable to his
fellow patients, Treece found unbearable. He was a man who needed to know, and knowledge was what was denied; he could not cope when facts were concealed from him and where the issues could not be
rationalized. He lay in bed and was miserable.

In the evening he asked the man next to him: ‘Where’s the toilet?’

‘Down at the end on the right,’ said the man.

Treece got up and walked unsteadily down the room and into the mean little toilet. Here at least he could be for a moment alone. He stayed there for a few minutes and then suddenly he heard a
loud voice in the ward cry: ‘And where is Mr Treece?’

‘Who?’

‘The fellow that came in this afternoon.’

‘He’s in the sluice.’

There were heavy footsteps. Treece pulled up his trousers. Then the door of the cubicle was flung open and the strong-willed staff nurse said: ‘And what do you think you’re doing, if
it isn’t a rude question?’

‘Using the toilet,’ said Treece.

‘Don’t you know you’re on complete rest?’

‘There are some things one
has
to do,’ said Treece.

‘You can do them in bed,’ said the nurse.

‘Well, I didn’t know that,’ said Treece.

A chair was fetched and he was wheeled up the ward, in public disgrace. The nurse lifted him into bed. ‘If I catch you out of here again,’ she said, ‘I’ll put you in a
crib bed that you can’t get out of.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Treece.

‘You’d better be,’ said the staff nurse, with a laugh.

‘I thowt tha shudna ha’ got up, but it weren’t none of my business,’ said the man in the next bed when the nurse had gone.

‘Well, really,’ said Treece, rather annoyed.

At ten o’clock the lights were put out and immediately people began to cough and spew up and down the ward. ‘Fetch me a bottle,’ said the old man on Treece’s other
side.

‘Oh no,’ said Treece. ‘I’m not allowed to move.’

The old man got up and sat on the side of the bed and urinated on the floor. Treece felt sure he would get blamed for this as well, but the night nurse came and mopped up and told the old man
not to do it again. ‘It’s the only way to get a bottle,’ said the old man with a clucking laugh.

Someone got up and went to the toilet and then tried to get into Treece’s bed by mistake. In the top bed someone was groaning hideously. Behind the screen the night nurse was telling the
runner about her love life and reading aloud to her from the case history. ‘He isn’t a professor, is he?’ cried the runner. ‘He doesn’t look much like one to
me,’ said the night nurse. This was true, thought Treece, for he didn’t look much like one to himself any more.

Throughout the night transactions of all sorts continued – some got up and began to run up and down the ward in hysteria, someone died amid sobs and groans, the old man in the next bed
kept shouting that he wanted to go home – and Treece got no sleep whatsoever. He was in a drowsy stupor the next morning at 5 a.m. when the nurse came and washed him and rubbed surgical
spirit on his behind. The day continued much as the previous one had done. In the afternoon Treece had a group of visitors: Dr Carfax, Merrick, Viola Masefield. Merrick was complete with umbrella.
They all looked an impressive sight. ‘We told them that we were all doctors – didn’t say what of,’ said Viola with a smile. ‘They thought the place had gone mad. They
think you’re the Prince of Wales or something.’ Merrick said: ‘Are they looking after you all right? Pretty rum crowd you’ve got in here, haven’t you?’

‘I wonder what happens to middle-class people when they’re ill,’ said Treece. ‘There are none here.’

‘Why don’t you go in the pay-bed wing?’ asked Merrick.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Treece. ‘It doesn’t seem right that one should.’

‘Honestly, Ian,’ said Viola. ‘You come in here with that umbrella as if this were the London Clinic or something.’

‘This wouldn’t suit me,’ said Merrick.

‘It suits me,’ said Treece.

‘Well, tell us, Stuart, what have you got?’ asked Viola. ‘Stigmata?’

‘I think it’s some sort of ulcer . . .’ said Treece.

‘Oh, ulcers. That’s very good,’ said Viola. ‘Did you see in last Sunday’s
Observer
, where it said that only successful . . . But need I go on? Everyone see
last Sunday’s
Observer
?’ Heads nodded. ‘Some time I must make some friends who don’t read the
Observer
.’

‘What else is there for us poor Lib.-Labs.?’ said Merrick. ‘The
Sunday Times
, I suppose, but it keeps having editorials beginning: “Mr Macmillan has been proved
right again.” ’

‘How do you feel?’ asked Viola.

‘Miserable,’ said Treece. ‘I feel that when they made me, they botched it.’

‘Serves you right for eating the things you cooked,’ said Viola. ‘No one else would have dared.’

They sat for a minute or two, trying to be cheery, but no one could think of anything to say. Then Dr Carfax told the story of the time when he was in hospital and had his appendix out, and the
day after the operation he was visited by a Chinese doctor, who, as Chinese are wont, did not pronounce his plurals: ‘Have you had your bowel open?’ he had asked Carfax. And ‘My
God!’ Carfax had, so he said, cried out in alarm, ‘You haven’t taken them out
too
, have you?’

Then they went. ‘Take care of yourself, Stuart dear,’ said Viola. ‘Is there anything you want?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Treece.

‘Well, be good, and don’t get Complications. They’re much worse than Symptoms. Goodbye.’

‘Ta-ta,’ cried the man in the next bed, eyeing Viola with a warmed look on his face. ‘Ta-ta,’ shouted the other patients as they all went out. ‘That your
missus?’ asked the man in the next bed. ‘No,’ said Treece; ‘she’s not.’

IV

Life in hospital is not the boring and peaceful experience that many imagine it to be. While nothing of great interest happens, and the mind does grow stale and concern with
outside things subsides into selfishness, the sort of selfishness one has on shipboard, when all links with responsibility seem severed, something happens all the time. In fact, as Treece
complained to his nurses, life in hospital was so arduous that it was a pity it had to happen to sick people; at least they should let them go home, now and then, for a rest. From 5 a.m. in the
morning, when he was roused, Treece was subjected to an endless battery of attentions. During the day, when he tried to sleep, he was roused and told that the nights were for sleeping. At night,
when he tried to sleep, people vomited by his ear, and nurses woke him up to give him sleeping tablets. He was permanently tired. Doctors and specialists prodded and poked him, almoners came to ask
if he had a suit, Legion of Mary girls to ask if he was a Catholic, other patients to ask him to make their wills, fetch them a bottle, write to their relatives, shave off their whiskers, hold
bowls while they were sick into them. There were nurses of all nationalities who needed things translating. Physiotherapists came to read his
Times
and night orderlies – nearly all
pacifists with high IQs, who wrote verse in the linen store when they were not busy – to read his
Manchester Guardian
.

A stand was erected by his bed, a needle gouged into his arm, and the blood-drip began. It dripped on inexorably for two days and nights. And as the days passed slowly on and his contingency to
the world seemed to disappear, he found himself increasingly listless and depressive. It was a world almost wholly uncongenial. Deprived of his society he seemed nothing, so much did he depend on
his society for his existence; now he was a lump of flesh only. Believing in civilized and respectful contacts, deep personal relationships, honesty and integrity of motive, recognition of the
individuality of persons, he was lost in a world where all that mattered was the simple physical constitution, the preservation of life itself, at whatever torture to the personality. The staff
here were very hard-working – but to them the personality issue was often an excrescence, and even to some a nuisance. As the staff nurse had told Treece, it wasn’t a tea-party.

This situation was a problem for Treece alone. For it seemed as if his special human situation had somehow sapped him morally, in the plain sense of the word moral, which demands a sound and
simple capacity for living life itself. Outside his own environment Treece’s vital force emerged as a small thing, that was weak in front of the most eternal human test, whether he was to
endure or to die; there is a further edge to alienation beyond which one ceases to have a real place in the world; and Treece had found himself more and more pushed towards the fringes of the
society he lived in, into a peripheral and invalid existence.

What was the poor little liberal humanist to do? The world was fragmented and there was no Utopia in sight, and as a liberal he was a symptom of the fragmentation he abhorred. He would not have
been anything other – it was a special fate. He coddled his fancy scruples, and they were everything to him. The great authoritarian structure of the Christian Church had tumbled under the
impact of just such honest scruples; and the eye of God, which was the eye of structured society, no longer peered and penetrated into every nook and cranny. Life, Treece would claim, was more real
when you went on from God, and go on you had to in order to live fully now. Once the principle of doubt had been admitted all was lost, as far as He was concerned. Whether you believed or not, men
now fluttered foolishly like young birds tumbled out of the nest, at their highest point of freedom and more glorious than ever before, yet on the edge of an ungovernable disaster . . . or so it
seemed to Treece. He could not be sure whether this was a figment of his own depressed mind or a discernible fact in the universe. The fact remained that he was a scrupulous liberal, too scrupulous
to believe anything, willing to make his mind up only on the evidence; and in the end what he had was really nothing. Of course, he preferred it this way. If the choice was between compromise and
destruction, then he was willing enough to destroy himself. In any case, whether he lived chastely or lecherously, believed or doubted, it made no difference. Because he lived late in the world,
and was a civilized creature, he stabbed as few people in the back as possible and did as little harm as he could. But there was nothing he really wanted to
do
. And life was no longer, for
people like him, a thing to trust so deeply, because there were other things he trusted more; what was proper became less and less what was viable. He had no goods or chattels or causes or faiths
– or loved ones – to tie himself to now, when it was of use to be tied. The moral passions can drive one too hard, until, as with Gulliver, home from his travels, ordinary life is
hardly to be borne.