The Facts of Life (26 page)

There was no clock in the ward and Edward’s watch had vanished with his clothes. For the first time in his life, he lost all track of the passage of time. He knew day from night and that his days were divided up by more or less indistinguishable meals, heralded by a gurgling in his stomach, but to tell whether it was Monday or Friday, the twelfth or the thirty-first, was beyond him. He had a birthday, marked by cards, a cake and a new pair of slippers. This gave him a date to seize on briefly, but he soon lost it again and did not especially care. Sometimes he seemed to miss a day. Sometimes it seemed he had no sooner fallen asleep than it was time to rise again. He had been liberated from numbers as utterly as he had been liberated from bother.

Then the comfortable doctor was replaced by one whose shining pate, fat hands and penetrating, sarcastic gaze were dimly familiar to him. He explained that he was going to treat Edward’s brain with electric shocks sufficiently strong to send him into convulsions.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘There is no cause. These shocks will heal you and the process will be quite painless. Think of it as a necessary but controlled violence, like shaking out the creases from a sheet.’

He explained it as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world and Edward believed him.

‘I have your wife’s consent,’ the fat doctor added. ‘Have you any questions?’

The merest hint of a smile twitched the corners of his lips, as though he were well aware of the unlikelihood of Edward’s mustering any response, much less anything so assertive as a question. Sure enough, Edward merely shook his head.

The shocks did hurt. He was led to a treatment room where he had to lie on a couch. Nurses tied his arms and ankles down and made him bite on a plastic spatula. A wet substance was smeared on his temples before something not unlike a pair of the bakelite studio headphones was slipped over them. Then followed an instant of shattering pain which, invariably, caused him to black out. When he came round, his arms and legs were untied and the apparatus had been wheeled away. He ached all over, his tongue felt far too large for his mouth, his head, as though it might float grotesquely off his shoulders. The strange thing was that the memory of lying down, of the electrodes and the brief, outrageous pain was wiped out afresh with each treatment. Each time he was led back to the treatment room he felt a gnawing sense of recognition which flared into sudden, sickening
déjà-vu
for the brief instant of the electric shock, only to be smothered again by the shock’s after-effect. He found he began to reach for words and be unable to find them, even if he wanted only to think them, not to speak them aloud. It seemed as though the ice that held him over the abyss were being methodically melted from below, but to express his fears aloud was increasingly beyond him.

As the strength of his night-time medication was reduced, he began to dream again or, at least, to recall his dreams for a few confused minutes on waking. He had a recurring nightmare in which he was pursuing someone or something through a set of empty rooms. The rooms opened out into each other to form a circle but, although he tugged each door open, he would find it firmly closed again when he returned to it. He knew it was vitally important for him to maintain his pursuit. If he stopped, not only would the doors become impossible to open but he would cease to be the hunter and become the prey. And yet, even as he persisted he felt the doors inexorably stiffen until he was having to squeeze through little more than a crack and his quarry’s progress grew louder behind him.

‘I dream now,’ he managed to tell Dr Caldecott, the man with the stuffed fish.

‘And what precisely do you dream about?’

‘I … I …’ Edward stumbled. ‘Trains.’

‘Trains?’ From the doctor’s frown it was clear he expected more than this.

‘Trains,’ Edward repeated and retreated back into silence.

Superficially his dreams had nothing to do with trains, it was true, but now it seemed to him that in allowing the word to rise unbidden to his lips, he had somehow blundered on to the very essence of his nightmare horror and there was no more to be said.

Even as the treatment fogged his recent memories, they seemed to revive images from the distant past. Inspired perhaps by similarities of institutional life, the same smells, the same long corridors, the same all-powerful, all-male routines, he began to recall his schooldays in minute, even insane detail. His English schooldays. He remembered timetables exactly: Latin before breakfast, double Maths on Saturday morning, divinity on Sunday night. He remembered the brutalities disguised in sports clothes, depths of hypocrisy plumbed in order to escape senseless punishment. He remembered hard little fists, relentlessly vindictive tongues, the stripping away of privacy, the pervasiveness of sarcasm, the difficult ambiguities of friendship. Now his personality was submerged by what? Fear. Medication. Electric currents. Back then he had learnt to submerge it voluntarily, learnt to suppress the characteristics most likely to attract derision or violence and, crucially, to offer mimicry as a kind of pacifying homage to the boys most likely to cause him harm. Letting his eyes stare, without seeing, at a few feet of yellow wall or clouded sky, Edward found himself trapped by remorseless memory in an environment where he lived in daily fear of exposure.

When Sally burst into the ward early one evening, pursued by an angrily remonstrating nurse, threw a coat about him and led him to the door, she unwittingly offered the eleventh hour reprieve every child in boarding-school prayed for.

‘We’re going home,’ she said.

‘Please,’ he told her, tightly holding her hand. ‘Yes.’

Sally had retrieved Edward – she thought of it as a kind of rescue – without discussing the matter with Thomas, her parents, anyone. What she was doing made her so nervous that, if she allowed someone to dissuade her, she could never again find the necessary resolve. Waltham was furious of course, threatening her that having once discharged her husband, she could not have him readmitted, but she found that his anger only stoked up her determination. Once she had Edward in the car, however, and was driving home, the enormity of what she had done dawned on her. She kept glancing across at him, fretful lest he fling open his door while they were moving or become violent, but he merely sat hugging himself and staring with a kind of greed through the dusk at the passing countryside. She had taken the precaution of chatting with a show of professional curiosity with a nurse during previous visits so she knew exactly what medication he was on. If all else failed, she could always approach Dr Richards to prescribe him some.

She drove back to The Roundel via her parents’ house, leaving Edward in the car while she darted in to collect Miriam. Miriam stirred sleepily as Sally transferred her from her bed to a carrycot, but she was dead to the world within minutes of their returning to the Wolseley. Edward said nothing but he watched his sleeping child for a few minutes before turning back to face the road. Sally took her straight to bed as soon as they were home, leaving Edward walking in the garden. She turned from switching off the light to find him standing in the doorway. She gasped.

‘You made me jump,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Is … is she asleep?’

‘Yes.’

Sally smiled and touched his chest, gently pushing him back onto the landing as she half-closed the door. To her surprise, Edward took her hand in both of his and pressed it. Then, hesitantly, he put his arms around her and drew her to him. Their movements felt as awkward as those of inexperienced dancers. He smelled strong, feral. She hugged him back, pressing her nose into the base of his neck and breathing deeply against his skin, which was still cold from the car.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘No,’ she replied.

He sighed heavily into her hair, once, twice, and then he began to cry. But this was not like his crying before. Then it had seemed like the expression of an anguish he could not express with words, now it had lost the edge of desperation. Now his sobs felt like the uncoiling of more straightforward, pent-up emotion. Whereas before she had found his tears alienated her, this time she found they gave access to a direct communication. Within seconds, she was crying too, for him, for her, for Miriam, for Dr Pertwee. Leaning against him, she sobbed with relief, heaving up the griefs and tensions that had been choking her. Clinging together in the darkness, they staggered, leant against the wall and eventually slumped to the chilly floor where they sat, clinging, pawing, stroking one another as they fell slowly silent. Sally felt an insidious quickening of her flesh, a kind of sweet inability to get close enough to him, then recognised the under-rehearsed sensation as desire. She turned her head slightly and planted a stealthy kiss on the skin below his ear. Then she realised his teeth were chattering and came to her senses.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘You’re still in those pyjamas! You’re freezing. I’ll run you a bath.’

He began the night in the room adjoining hers, pyjamas buttoned up to his neck, blankets pulled up to his chin. The sudden change of scene and withdrawal from sleeping tablets made him restless, however. Several times in the night she woke to hear him pacing about the landing or saw light in the crack beneath their interconnecting door. In the early hours of the morning he crept into her room and slipped with an apologetic mumble into her bed. They did not make love, although several times she felt his erection press her thigh, merely lay close, loin to buttocks, knee to knee-back, his chest against her shoulders, his arm heavy below her breasts. It was as if separation had begun to alter their shapes and they needed to mould themselves to one another afresh.

She found he liked to shadow her about the house and garden, mutely offering tentative help with her tasks. It was only with Miriam that he held back, for all Sally’s encouragement, but as she fed her, changed her clothes, brushed her emerging curls, he watched intently. Once, when Miriam tossed a toy aside and laughed her laugh of triumph, he looked as though he were about to smile. On one occasion, he spent longer than usual in the bathroom. Suddenly uneasy, Sally ran along the landing and called out to him. Emerging, he nearly smiled again, but contented himself with a sort of snort as he caught the relief in her expression.

‘When I think of what they might have done to him,’ she told Thomas, as they watched at a window while Edward pegged out nappies to dry, ‘it makes me seethe. I mean, I know he was withdrawn, but I’m sure half that speechlessness was drug-induced.’

She had no fond belief in the healing power of her love, not now, but she trusted to a peaceful atmosphere, and time. Without her forcing him, he began to offer up shy fragments of conversation; simple discussions of food, flowers, weather. She brought Thomas over often, persuading him to stay overnight, in the hope that his presence might stimulate Edward too.

Her abiding fear was that the electro-convulsive therapy had somehow damaged his musical abilities. When she wrote to the studio insurers to say that he was out of hospital and should soon be available again for work it was with a certain superstitious dread at the hopeful deceit in her statement. Days later, Jerry rang in great excitement to say that Edward’s score for
4.15 To Bucharest
had been nominated for an Oscar.

‘Don’t worry about the money. We’ll fly the pair of you out there for the ceremony, just in case. What do you say?’

‘Oh Jerry, that’s so exciting!’ she enthused, genuinely pleased, but at the same time tense at the prospect of having her hand forced. ‘I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. He’s asleep now or I’d call him to the phone.’

‘So you’ll both come to Hollywood?’

‘Jerry we can’t. Not really. I just don’t think he’s up to it yet. Soon, I’m sure, but not just yet.’

Jerry had made understanding noises and said of course someone else could collect the award for Edward if he won, but she heard behind his words the rustle of fading contracts and impatient ticking of financial clocks. Edward still tended to turn radio programmes off when there was too much talking, but he had begun to listen to records, sitting close to the radiogram on a stool and scrutinising sleeve notes intently.

He won the Oscar. Jerry rang from California in the middle of the night. She woke Edward to tell him the amazing news but he seemed singularly unimpressed. The studio sent newspaper photographers to picture an actor dressed as a postman delivering the statuette. Edward smiled obediently for the cameras, clutching the thing while Sally stood proudly beside him, Miriam in her arms, and he said a few words to the local newspapermen. Sally’s parents were tremendously proud and Thomas had champagne delivered ‘to wet young Oscar’s head’ but after the fuss had died down, Edward climbed the ladder in his study to set the thing on a high shelf along with the bound manuscript of
Job
. Sally had begun to fret seriously about money, and was convinced the studio would not pay his salary indefinitely, so the award came as a huge relief, since even
in absentia
Edward could be seen to be earning his keep. When an American studio rang to enquire about his contractual situation she referred them to Jerry Liebermann, secure in the knowledge that the enquiry would raise Edward’s value.

Then, one day, she was tugging dirty sheets off the bed when she was surprised by the sound of the piano. She walked onto the landing and looked down. Miriam was strapped into her high chair, her hands patting vaguely at the toys before her but her gaze concentrated entirely on her father. Edward was sitting at the keyboard. He played a few simple chords, then a cadence or two. Although the piano needed tuning, he seemed to be relishing the simple harmonic progressions, the resolution of one chord in the more open texture of the one that followed. Miriam banged the tray before her and let out a delighted shout. Edward looked up at her and smiled, truly smiled. Then he walked into his study, came back with a lapful of music books, riffled roughly through them, selected something, dumped the rest on the floor with a bang and began to play. It was a sweet, trilling melody with a burbling accompaniment in the left hand. Miriam shouted again and tossed a teddy towards the piano. Spotting Sally leaning on the landing balustrade, Edward looked up as he continued playing.