Titus Awakes

29

Intimations of Other Days

THE DAILY DUTIES could never cease. If some catastrophe had razed this building to the ground, with all its inmates in it, would it have mattered? But was it any more pointless than most of man’s pursuits? The line between sanity and the loss of sentience became daily too perplexing for Titus to reach any conclusion, yet each day he helped to keep alive beings who hardly knew they were alive; and others who, knowing, did not wish it. Nevertheless, apart from one or two of the really unlovable among them, he was drawn to them by an indefinable feeling. A feeling that he had thought had died in him many years ago: compassion and protectiveness towards people from whom he neither wished nor expected to receive gratitude, and he knew that if there were ever any situation where there was a choice of leaving them to their fate, or saving their living bodies, he would save them, but no rational thought could explain this reasoning.

He had been told that the man who had been brought in some days before was an artist, and no one knew what was the matter with him. Titus remembered the pleading way in which the man’s wife had asked him to look after her husband. When the effect of the drugs had worn off and with difficulty he sat up in his bed, one of the most pitiful sounds that Titus had ever heard almost rent the ward in two. A cry of despair. It belonged to neither man nor beast. It had in it all the pain that man has suffered since time began. It was so basic that it affected everyone, both staff and inmates, with an unnamed fear – such as the animal world feels before a natural disaster. The cries could not be alleviated by soothing words, or gentle persuasion. It was the soul and the heart of all humanity, pleading to whatever God there was for release.

The only release that was possible was an injection to quieten and deaden his consciousness and, being too frail to ward off the needle, he crumpled back on to the bed and slept, a heavy disturbed sleep.

The whole ward was in a turmoil, and it took Peregrine and Titus and two or three other men to calm it as best they could.

After the lunches were over, what few visitors ever came were allowed in.

At two o’clock the bell rang in the locked ward and the door was opened. The artist’s wife walked towards her husband’s bed. He was still in his uneasy sleep. There was so little room that there was nowhere to sit except perched at the end of the bed. She put some things she had brought on the table and sat, looking at her husband with a look of longing, a palpable aching.

‘How is he?’ she asked, knowing that no one could say anything that could assuage so deep an affliction. Why or how should they, when surrounded by such an abundance of human disarray?

There was nothing for her to do but await his uneasy reawakening. The bell rang again, and an elderly woman walked the length of the bed-scape to the bed next to her husband, where an old man, sunken in cheek and jaw, lay dying. Another wife, another life. Each person, alienated in his own prison. This elderly visitor had taken on the unseeing eyes of those around her. She had no hope for the future, only a past that no one could share with her, her own husband included. She was not new to this world, as she sat upon a small stool by the bed. From time to time an emaciated hand struggled from the bedclothes and reached for an answering hand, and the smallest whisper emerged, and as the old woman touched his fingers, the artist’s wife could just hear an echo from a world of years and years ago. ‘Hold my hand, mother . . . mother . . . hold my hand,’ then a rattle so faint as almost not to be heard, as the life in the bed floated away unobserved.

The only difference it made in the huge room was the arrival of a screen that now separated the quick (if that were not an exaggeration) from the dead.

The sleeping man in the next bed did not awake. The trumpets were too faint, and the two hours that had passed were over, and his wife had to leave.

Titus watched her as her steps took her back to the locked door and into the world outside. He did not take part in the formalities that followed the ending of a life, but once more, with his work companions, had to soothe the agitation of the living.

And so the days wore on, the nights wore out, the lives wore down. Titus was drawn daily to a feeling towards the artist that he could not explain to himself. As though there was an indefinable link between his life and that haunted man for whom he had to perform duties that in his younger days would have affronted his dignity. Despite the haggard eyes, the remnants of teeth discoloured and decaying from too many drugs, there was an intelligence so forceful that it probed the inner life of everyone in the ward. His words would not make the sentences that he searched for, and in his frustration he would hit out at those around him, but with so little force there was no danger for anyone. Titus watched sometimes as his wife handed him paper and pencil with which to draw, and as the hand faltered over a few marks, he would brush them away with a sigh so piteous and profound it almost rent his being.

Sometimes, when the day was fine, they would go out to the vast gardens, lovely and cared for. Huge, rich, generous rhododendrons of many degrees of red led to an apple orchard of old trees.

The artist could not walk without assistance, but dragged his feet and made no movement with his arms. Whichever arm was not in his wife’s lay rigid, totem-poled to his side. Their progress was slow, but aware. The squirrels that teased their steps, and so endearingly cradled in their tiny human paws the crumbs and nuts that had been scattered to them, were a delight to them both. They would stand still, just looking, until the husband swayed on his feet; then an arm would act as a brake to forestall the inevitable fall backwards.

Sometimes, when the wife did not come and the weather was fine, Titus would clean and feed and dress the artist and take him out into the gardens himself, linking his arm for protection only. There was no verbal communication, for it had ceased. Only the eyes looked and searched Titus. The eyes saw. They, the only remaining conscious sense, were more alive than any eyes Titus had ever seen, in his childhood, adolescence, young manhood, in and out of every world that he had ever traversed. He felt understood. He was one with this man. Whatever physical humiliations he had to perform were nothing. The truth spoke from the eyes, as he had never before heard, but sometimes when the tragedy seemed too intense the eyes smiled and a little gesture like a clown’s would be conjured up by the deprived hands, and Titus could smile back, and for a few moments there was peace.

Towards the artist’s wife also Titus felt the same closeness. Never very articulate, he had no need here, either, of verbal communication. They all seemed to be one person. He automatically performed all his duties outside these two. He was efficient, kind and far from lazy, and was respected by his companions, who all the same noted with surprise his affection for the patient in bed 10.

There was not always much said between the men who carried out their duties in the ward and the pompous officials who by their demeanour showed their importance, but it was with a great sense of shock that Titus was told one morning to get the artist ready to leave. Not that he was cured, but that he should never have been sent there in the first place. He had an illness that did not belong with them, and he was being sent elsewhere. His wife would go with him in an ambulance and that would be that. Titus must see that he was shaved, dressed as cleanly as possible and fed, and oversee his removal from the ward to the car.

The morning dawned and the wife arrived. Titus fulfilled many duties, then turned to bed 10. He shaved, dressed and cleaned the poor limbs, and made the patient ready for the departure. The man had all the intuition of an animal, which knew that something was about to happen that would affect his life, and a terrible restlessness manifested itself. He tried to move, and the wife sat in a chair by him, trying to calm him, showing him books, which she told Titus were his work. He pushed them aside with an impatience of gesture that for all the sluggishness of movement was a powerful negation of ownership.

The day wore on, and there was no sign of departure. It was not until late afternoon that a chair, with none of the elegance or grandeur of a sedan chair, was brought by two men into the ward, and the patient from number 10 bed was lifted into it and wrapped like a mummy in red blankets. The little procession made its way out of the ward, gathering the few paltry possessions, and Titus took the wife’s arm and followed with her, down the long, bleak, dimly lit corridors, and out into the grey evening to the waiting ambulance. As the patient was lifted into the back of it he made a final gesture of farewell, and a faint voice whispered, ‘Titus.’