Four Gated City (51 page)

It was not a joke. The animal had got hold of a pebble from somewhere. How? Leaned down out of its cage to reach up a stone that had been thrown at it by a child, perhaps? At any rate, it had a pebble, and was trying to sharpen it. Sad, painful: it was a round smooth pebble. But it was the only thing the animal had. After some minutes of labour it turned itself, its back still kept to possible watching enemies and spies, and sawed with that very round.
smooth pebble at the wire of its cage. It worked, and rubbed and tried and laboured. Then dejected, defeated it sat down, having carefully hidden the pebble under some straw and moved itself around to face the watching people: Martha and Mark. The look in its eyes was the look in Paul’s eyes now. What fantasies or plans of revenge, or hate, or escape did that poor baboon harbour, as it sat there with its round pebble, its only weapon, only possession, pushed behind some straw?

Martha said:’ Paul, the term starts in ten days. If you’re sensible you’ll be there at school on the first day. And in the meantime you’d better do some thinking: there’s a limit to what your uncle can do. And don’t let yourself be caught up in that machinery: there’s a big impersonal machine out there-sensible people keep clear of it.’

He remained silent, watching her. Then he slipped out of the chair and went up to his room.

There was a telephone call from Lynda: would Martha please go and see her? Previous messages had said that Lynda did not want to see either Mark or Martha.

The hospital was near a country town. Martha got on to a train, and travelled through the neat English countryside. Then off the train on to a bus; she travelled through nice suburban respectable England, little gardens, little houses, the families, mummy, daddy, and one, two, three children, all going to school till they were fifteen (the under-privileged) or till twenty-three or so, if destined for university. On the outskirts of the little town, a birch wood, then, a large long high red brick wall. She entered the wall through well-painted green iron gates, and was in something like a park, with trees, shrubs and flowerbeds among which were scattered all kinds of buildings, some large, some small, some like cottages, others like barracks, or prisons. For this mental hospital was huge and catered for many thousands, from the very ill, in the barracky prison buildings, about whom the others joked:
Abandon hope all ye who enter here
, to the fortunate like Lynda. Lynda was not in a cottage, but in a medium sized block. It was approached through tidily arranged rose-beds, where some patients were working. They could be recognized as patients because of their slow-moving indifferent condition. Martha walked through clean glittering corridors, and rooms where people sat smoking, watching television, talking together, playing cards, in that unmistakable atmosphere of
the mental hospital, where everything is in slow motion, movements, voices, air, sensations. Drugs. The smell of drugs. Drugged, slowed people: as if they had entered a watery dream world, and moved there in a different dimension, hypnotized.

Lynda was in a ward, or room which had six other beds in it. It was very neat and bright. It had a mad tidiness about it. Each bed had a locker, and there was a chair for every other bed.

Lynda sat on her bed. She wore a greyish dressing-gown, which was rather grubby. And her beautiful hands had blood-stains around the finger-tips.

‘Martha, ’ she said at once, hurriedly, but with an effort, as if against the sluggishness of the drugs:’ I’ve got to get out of here.’

Martha sat on the chair near the bed. The bed was very high; a hospital bed. The chair was very low. She looked up at Lynda, whose face seemed somewhere up near the ceiling. She got out of the chair and climbed on the bed close to Lynda.

‘But, Lynda, you’re not committed, are you?’

This was stupid. Too sensible. For some moments, entering this world, one was always too sensible. She had to adjust.

‘They said they’d commit me, they’d lock me up-last time I was silly.’

Martha knew, Lynda knew, that this was a threat merely; part of the game: naughty child, bad child, behave or else.

‘What is Mark saying?’ inquired Lynda, bringing her face close to Martha’s: the lovely, ill face, the great, ill eyes were a few inches from Martha’s. She moved back a little. So did Lynda, who exclaimed peevishly:’ Everyone from outside is so … you’re all scared of landing up here yourself, that’s why!’

She sat, trembling, angry.

‘Mark would like to come and see you, ’ said Martha.

Lynda trembled, turned away, looked for a box on her locker-top, found a pill, swallowed it.

‘I got violent, ’ she said. ‘I do, sometimes. They give me injections and pills-then I fight and get violent. Then they say they’ll put me in Abandon Hope. I keep asking them, don’t give me pills, I can do without them. But they do. You remember when you said about you getting your memory back, you couldn’t have done that if you were drugged to the eyes, could you? No. I said to them, I’ve got a friend, she lost her memory, but she got it all back again. That goes to show, doesn’t it? But they thought I was talking about myself.
I’d forgotten, you’ve got to be careful about what you say. I expect it’s in the dossier by now, that I’ve lost my memory.’

‘Lynda, why don’t you just come home?’

‘I know Mark doesn’t want me home.’

‘That isn’t true, ’ said Martha, at once and with conviction.

Lynda, trembling, leaned forward to search Martha’s face, her weight on her two hands. A nurse appeared. She was a young professional-looking woman. She drew a curtain across, and adjusted a blanket lying on the foot of a bed. She did not look at Lynda directly, nor at another young woman who sat dozing in a chair, but she had absorbed the atmosphere, whether Martha was ‘upsetting’ Lynda, and she knew what she had to report to matron and to doctors. She went past, with a smile at Lynda’s visitor, a nod at Lynda, and disappeared.

‘This business of my losing my memory-the doctor goes on and on. They don’t believe me now. The funny thing is, now I think: I can’t remember that and that. Well, most people can’t remember things. But I keep having to tell myself, it’s quite normal if I can’t remember this and that. I’ve got to get out of here …’ She started to cry. ‘I can’t help crying, it’s these bloody pills.’

‘Lynda, do you want to leave? To come home?’

Lynda sighed, relaxed, stopped crying.

‘That’s the point. Do you know why I came? I knew they’d drug me up to the eyeballs as soon as I came in. Then it would be their fault. Not my fault. That’s why. But I discovered something. I’ve been off for a whole year. And I hadn’t realized that I had improved-because I had, you know, really. I had forgotten what it was like to be full of muck all the time. I kept thinking, what’s the use, I might as well take them. But when I got back in here and I started in again then I realized how different I was. You don’t have any
will
, you don’t want anything, you just want to sit about. But now I’m scared. If I come home … there’s no point if I come home and go on taking pills. I might as well be here. Dorothy’s not going to be there now, you know.’

What it amounted to was, Lynda was saying she was going to be alone. She didn’t want to be alone.

‘You could come home and try to be-part of everything.’

Lynda came to life, responded. This was the point.

‘Yes, but Francis? What about Francis? It’s all right for you and Mark, you’re used to me.’

‘And Paul, ’ said Martha.

‘Yes.’

‘I think you should come home and try.’

‘Will you ask Mark first? I mean Mark might not…’

Lynda collapsed back on her bed and lay weeping, a handkerchief clenched in her fist, which was pressed to her cheek.

Oh, don’t take any notice, ’ she muttered. ‘I cry and cry, I don’t know what for.’

The nurse came back, smiled at Martha, and stood quietly by Lynda’s bed.

‘Mrs. Coldridge, ’ she said, ‘would you like to get up now and come down for supper?’

‘No, ’ said Lynda.

‘I think you should try. You’ve lost far too much weight, you know. You don’t want us to have to give you insulin, do you?’

‘Give me arsenic if you like, ’ said Lynda.

‘Now, Mrs. Coldridge, ’ said the nurse.

‘Oh all right, I’ll come in a minute.’

The nurse lingered, left. Lynda sat up.

‘Talk to Mark, ’ she said. Sitting on the bed, she stripped off her gown. She was certainly very thin, her collar bones stuck out, her shoulders showed blades of bone. She leaned over, pulled a roll of pink out of her locker, drew it over her head, slid down to the floor with a bump, and unrolled the pink downwards on to her. It was, when pressed and looked after, a very pretty dress. Lynda stood, with rumpled pink hanging on her, running her grubby hand through lank hair.

‘I’ll get some food inside me, ’ she muttered. ‘Talk to Mark.’

Martha kissed her and left, through flowerbeds and shrubs and trees.

She went to see Dr Lamb.

About a week before Dorothy slashed her wrists, Martha had seen, among the pictures that moved in her inner eye (very numerous these days), a scene of Dorothy, in a lacy black petticoat, that had a rip in the lace under the left arm, leaning over the basin in the downstairs bathroom. Martha saw this from the back, and slightly to one side. Dorothy turned, blood running from one wrist. In the hand whose wrist was running blood, she held a razor blade, and was sawing at the other. What impressed Martha about this was the care with which Dorothy did it. Her face, vindictive, was
frowning with concentration. There was a smudge of blood on her cheek-bone.

When Martha went down to the basement on the morning this scene took place (in life), because of the screams of the cleaning woman, Dorothy had fainted. She wore a black lace petticoat, ripped under the arm, and had blood on her face and on both wrists.

This was by no means the first time this kind of thing had happened, but Martha was now brooding about possible responsibility. Should she have gone down to Dorothy and said:’ Excuse me, but you are going to slash your wrists, please don’t! That is, unless you have already done it at some time? You will be wearing a black lace petticoat, ’ etc.

Or she could have rung up Dr Lamb: Dorothy is going to slash her wrists, she might have said. Oughtn’t she to be persuaded not to? Yes, I know she has taken overdoses in the past, but this time, it will be her wrists.

To Dorothy she might even have said, entering the persona of a Rosa Mellendip: Beware of a black lace petticoat that has a rip under one arm!

The thing was, she had a great reluctance to think about it at all: cowardice. She knew perfectly well it was cowardice; and she approached Dr Lamb as it were with a sideways crab scuttle, trying to think out ways to ask questions and not expose herself. She was afraid of Dr Lamb-of the machinery.

There was no one else to ask: that was the point. Very strange that, when you came to think of it. She was afraid of Dr Lamb, and of the power that he had, yet, with a certain kind of question there was nobody in this complex and so-sophisticated society, that she could ask.

There was nobody, ever, who could approach Dr Lamb without a certain kind of tremor. When he spoke to law courts, or advised policemen, or sat in judgement about this sick person or that: when a mortally confused human being sat before him, what Dr Lamb said was the truth. Very, very strange, no matter how one looked at it.

Apart from Dr Iamb’s wife, or mistress, or child, or close friend, there was nobody who could approach him without this tremor, the slave’s silent withdrawal behind defences.

As for the people who actually became Dr Lamb’s patients, and
must submit to this or that treatment, they were all there as a result of force, or pressure, direct or subtle-that of society, their families, an ordinary doctor who was out of his depth. Or Lamb, whether benign, cruel, a secret lover of power, or a man gifted with insight, was always in a position of strength. Because it was he who knew-society had said he did-everything that could be known about the human soul. Or rather, while he would be the first to concede that his knowledge was merely provisional, this was not reflected in the way patients were treated.

This was the central, the key fact, about this great machinery of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, clinics, mental hospitals, which dealt with what they referred to as the mental health of the country. In any situation, anywhere, there is always a key fact, the essence. But it is usually every other fact, thousands of facts, that are seen, discussed, dealt with. The central fact is usually ignored, or not seen.

The central fact here was that nobody approached Dr Lamb unless he had to. In approaching Dr Lamb one approached power. It was hard to think of a power like it, in its inclusiveness, its arbitrariness, its freedom to behave as it wished, without checks from other places or powers.

There was in fact only one check: was Or Lamb by nature a man who had some kind of humility about this position he held, which was an almost unlimited power based on an admitted ignorance?

Dr Lamb was not sitting in his chair; but at the end of the room where two small easy chairs were by the window. Martha had said on the telephone that this visit was not on her own account: he was showing tact, delicacy. This was going to be treated almost as a social occasion. In a few moments a small tray appeared with tea.

‘I saw Lynda, ’ said Martha. ‘I went to the hospital.’

‘Ah, ’ said Dr Lamb. ‘I tried to get her into another, but at such notice, there wasn’t a choice.’

He was apologizing for the hospital.

‘Would you say that Lynda was worse than she was?’

‘Of course, I’m not dealing with her personally. But I spoke to the doctor who is handling her, over the telephone, this morning.’ He took off his glasses, and laid them aside. He looked very tired.

‘Of course you visited Mrs. Coldridge before, in the private hospital? You know, those enormous fees relatives pay, it’s not for better treatment, on the contrary, it is often worse.’

‘I suppose they feel they are more in control of what goes on, ’ said Martha. ‘If they are paying …’