The Emperor Waltz Read online

  Patients, too, behaved for the most part within onstage and offstage modes, meekly using the vocatives ‘Nurse’ and ‘Doctor’ in ways unfamiliar in the outside world – the parallels would be ‘Shop assistant, will you sell me a white shirt?’ ‘Architect, you may have forgotten to put a staircase into the building.’ They toned down their habitual diction, and assumed a facial expression of terrible sweetness when anyone professional was by. They mostly took orders, and had agreed to do everything at the time ordained for them by the hospital – I never heard a patient say, as would have been quite reasonable, ‘Actually, I’m just in the middle of a phone call – can you do Dennis first?’ Offstage, once the nurses had gone, the patients embarked on a more relaxed and habitual style of behaviour, saying ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ as they would normally do, and sharing details of their lives without any restraint.

  Onstage and offstage behaviour differs greatly between professions and occupations. A contrary set of offstage indicators was made apparent to me some time after this stay in hospital, when we went on holiday to Mykonos, the predominantly gay Greek island. The beaches on Mykonos are filled with sunbeds under umbrellas, tended by extraordinarily beautiful men in skimpy shorts who bring drinks and refreshments at some expense. These men had a distinctive onstage behaviour. With the customers, they were openly flirtatious, even somewhat lewd, telling us that we had a ‘nice bum’ or they bet we were going to go off for a ‘nice naughty walk’ later, meaning that we were going to go and have sex with strangers in the dunes. This manner was formally assumed, and not very natural. When the beach boys were talking among themselves, they dropped into a natural, offstage manner; their voices grew harsh and direct and complaining; they lit cigarettes in a tough-guy mode; their stance grew less servile. Though their conversation was in Greek, it was easy to guess its content: how much money each of them had made, a subject unalluded to in onstage behaviour. It was not about sex, and certainly admitted nothing of flirtation in it; their behaviour grew direct and complaining. Although the content of their onstage and offstage behaviour was quite different from that in other professions, for instance that in the hospital, the clear division operated in precisely the same way. There was even the same useful physical indicator of the rows of beds – of patients and of sunbathers – in both cases.

  The divisions of offstage and onstage behaviour between both patients and nurses was not enforced by the other group’s presence, merely encouraged by it. Sometimes, late at night or at quiet times, a nurse or a patient would slip into offstage mode with each other, and the nurse would sit down on the bed and talk quite happily about informal matters, if she liked the patient enough. The patient’s offstage manner was more flaunted, less rationed; he often tried to reel the nurse in with offstage confidences and even an offstage style. It seemed to me that no sharing of ideas, no persuasion could take place while either patient or nurse was in onstage mood. The only thing that could occur would be the successful appeal to aspects of the nurse’s professional, onstage, duties. Only when the nurses gathered together at the administration desk of the ward could one tell another that she had seen Django Unchained last night, and it had been gory but very entertaining, and she recommended it; if a patient, walking past in a parallel offstage manner, had interrupted to say that he, too, had seen it and enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a patch on Jackie Brown, which was the most underrated of all Tarantino’s films, then the offstage nurses would have reacted with surprise, would have turned back into efficient, professionally kindly figures, would perhaps have seen the off-duty cinephile patient back to his bed by holding his elbow and pulling him firmly along with coos and amicable sounds of encouragement. In no case would they have admitted to enjoying the same film, in the limitless space outside the hospital’s decreed tasks.

  The offstage space was a dangerous one, and both nurses and patients were vulnerable to it. Its looming prospect, in anything other than well-defined areas, secured from intrusion or onstage performers like Joe, appealing for sympathy and a cigarette in accordance with agreed structures of behaviour, persuaded the nurses to retreat sharply, and take up a formal position, one arm raised in pity and sorrow like Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Tragedy. Joe and his Irish friend failed in almost every attempt to persuade the nurses to do what they wanted them to do, because they had no means of bringing them into an offstage space. Their informalities only created a responding chilly formality, and the target replied by using the patient’s name: ‘I’ve told you before, Joe …’ The only people with whom they could share an offstage space was, it appeared, each other, and they could not do each other any favours whatsoever. The dropping into a formal offstage mode, as Joe and his friend should have discovered by now, would not by itself create a reciprocal offstage mode in the interlocutor. It would be just as likely to push the target into a more rigid onstage manner.

  I noticed, however, that though this was true of the nurses, the same could not be said for the doctors. I wondered if it was a function of power within the social structure. Doctors would enter the ward, still chatting to each other about the holiday they had just booked in Mali, and would discuss the patients loudly while at the end of the beds, not troubling to keep any professional, important, backstage discussions to their own space. The grander the doctor was, the more readily he would engage with a cheerful conversation about wives, husbands, bus routes, books that had just been read, films that had just opened, and other social strategies. Sometimes this clearly fell into the category of ‘good bedside manner’. Sometimes, however, this was not an attempt at a good bedside manner, but simply a superior disregard for professional demands of onstage and offstage behaviour, which not only occurred within the earshot of the patient – ‘Ah, Charles,’ one consultant said, standing at the end of my bed, ‘let’s see if you can make yet another hash of this, then. How’s Rebecca?’ – but sometimes actually engaged him in the break from the onstage stance. This, I believed, was why it was in fact easier to influence and gain meaningful contact with the doctors. Their superior conviction that there was no need to maintain a rigid and performed onstage mode once through the ward doors left them wide open to the exercise of influence, and fertile ground for the spreading of principles. The nurses, on the other hand, were much harder to reach and to influence. Their rigid sense of onstage and offstage moments left them invulnerable to the spread of thought, and it was hard to plant a seed of consideration in this stony ground. You had to get them sitting on the edge of the bed. I concluded that the way into their thoughts was not to try to spread an idea, but to act as a calm, offstage recipient for whatever ideas and principles they wanted to spread. I waited, and I understood why they were called ‘patients’.

  8.

  The ward sister, like many of the nurses, was Nigerian, stern and practical, and ran a tight ship. The first time I saw her, I was on my way downstairs to fetch a morning newspaper, and meekly asked permission to leave the ward. ‘Very well,’ she said, examining the watch hanging upside down on her breast. ‘But you must be returned here in twelve minutes, exactly. That is when the consultant begins to make his rounds, and you must not miss him. He will not return for your sake. That is your responsibility. Do you understand? Twelve minutes?’ She said all this not in a fierce or reproving way, just in a manner that set out the facts and left me to assume responsibility for my own actions. I said that I would wait until the consultant had seen me, and returned to my bed.

  Her name was Desdemona, and I did not see her relaxing her stance in any circumstances, even with her staff. She was the person who would decide if I could be moved from my present position, directly next to the colossal shit-machine that was Joe. But why should I be moved? Somebody had to occupy that position. Why should it not be me? The solution, it appeared to me, was that Joe should be moved to a room of his own, but the reasons why that had not been undertaken were clear. Joe’s demands were too much even when he was calling out to the passing nurses; if they had to respond every time he rang a
bell, they would do nothing else all day long. Moreover, it was evidently a principle with the nurses not to do anything that Joe asked them to do, and that had spread into a principle not to do anything beyond the necessary that might benefit him. It was necessary, therefore, to find a way in which one could persuade those in power, without asking directly, to be moved away from Joe and ideally into a private room. The means of achieving that would be to enter Desdemona’s offstage space. But she had no offstage space.

  She came to see me half a dozen times a day, to take blood pressure and blood sugar – ‘obs’, in the hospital’s terminology. I submitted cheerfully, passing a little comment each time. The first time she pricked my finger to draw a bead of blood for analysis, I heard her muttering, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ and I said, ‘That’s really quite all right – it doesn’t hurt a bit.’ It did not, in fact; years of playing the double bass had given me a tough pad of skin at the tip of my fingers, and a bicycle fall had deadened the sensation long ago. But she looked at me with a little surprise, and explained that in her culture saying, ‘Sorry,’ was not necessarily an apology, but a means of expressing empathy with whatever someone was enduring. Desdemona, with her formal offering of empathy, was going to be a hard nut to crack.

  On the third day I was there, she came to my bed to take the obs, and found me in a low mood. My cannula had had to be removed in the middle of the night and replaced at a different point, it had become so very painful. Subsequently, a doctor had that morning told me again that my toe might very well need to be amputated. I had no memory of using that toe for any purpose at all, and I didn’t suppose it did anything to keep me upright. Still, from adult experience of tooth extraction, I believed that once something started to be trimmed, it went on being trimmed and clipped; one toe would be followed by another, and another, and the foot. I wanted not to start on this process, and a restless night of pain had not helped me to take a positive outlook.

  ‘Do you have a problem?’ she asked, not unsympathetically.

  I explained some of what the doctor had told me.

  She shook her head. ‘You are in the right place,’ she said. ‘We are keeping a very close eye on you. Nothing will go badly wrong, and we will let you go when we are happy about everything, when everything looks as if it is heading in the right direction.’

  ‘That may be days,’ I said. ‘I really don’t want to stay long in hospital.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Desdemona said. ‘This is the best place for you at the moment. Are you …’ She seemed to be about to ask about the ward arrangements, but I had decided I would not raise that on my own: I would get them to make the offer as if from their own initiative. ‘May I ask – are you a Christian?’

  I could have kissed Desdemona. I knew that she was probably not allowed to do this, and as she sat on the end of my bed, and started to explain that she had found her faith of great help in dealing with suffering and difficulty, I felt all the power of the potential convert, wavering and wondering, and all the time reeling in the evangelist like a salmon on a hook. Desdemona had found English people so strange, discovering that they had no religious faith and did not, it seemed, care whether they had one or not.

  ‘I see, I see,’ I said, nodding and opening my eyes as wide as I could.

  You see, Desdemona went on, her children had been raised knowing about God, and now were very fine people, with children of their own, and very good jobs, and still, they all go to church every Sunday … Her voice, deep in its offstage enchantments, wound on, her tone lowered as she explained, quite gently, not at all offensively, what religion had done for her. My eyes were firmly on a bed in a private room with, ideally, a good view of the Houses of Parliament over the river. I concentrated on appearing to accept everything she said, as if I were ever in my life going to give a moment’s thought to Christianity’s old rigmarole, as if its history and hopes of benevolence would ever occupy my mind for a moment.

  ‘I see, I see,’ I said, and Desdemona’s voice was low and trusting, and her eyes were shining. She was about as offstage as a nurse in this busy ward would ever allow herself to get. After a few minutes, she got up from the end of my bed, and again took my blood pressure. I let her get on with it. Only when she went to make a record of it did she notice. ‘I’ve done this already! I’m getting all in a tizzy,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you’re allowed,’ I said. ‘I should have said something.’

  ‘Now, give what I’ve said a good thinking over,’ she said. She smiled, a pleasant, kindly smile, and I was for a moment a small child in a mother’s care. ‘I must get on, but we’ll have another talk some time. This is a good place for thinking about your life, a few days in this place.’

  It was true. She went on with her chores. I waited until she left the ward, and then hopped off my bed to limp towards the bathroom. Nobody was about yet – it was the dead time between lunch, served at twelve prompt, and the arrival of visitors at two. In the ward, I caught the eye of Robert, the stroke sufferer. He had heard me attempt to listen and show the appearance of interest in Desdemona’s Christian belief. He had more time for thinking about life than anyone else here, not eaten up with thoughts of injustice or neglect, unable to be anyone but himself in his mute gaze and gestures, and the nurses loved him. His mute gaze caught mine. He looked at me with rage, contempt and dismissal. I looked away.

  But that afternoon I was moved from the position next to Joe to the bed by the window, without having to ask directly at all.

  9.

  I noticed that, as the days went by, I stopped being grateful for what was being done for me. When I took a shower in the morning, I took no trouble to keep my foot dressing dry. Instead, I returned to bed with it sopping wet, and rang the patients’ bell for the nurse, explaining that it would need to be changed. The first time I did this, I said it had been an accident; the second time, I merely said that it would need to be changed. The expression of regret and human sympathy was beginning to give way to lordly demands, and after that to querulous complaint at how slowly things were being achieved, no doubt.

  There was a danger that in hospital, I would start to think of human relations as a means to get things done for me. The only point of the performance of selflessness, of interest in other people, was going to be that it would serve my selfish requests. I could put up with pretending to be interested in other people, so long as it got my way. Was this all that human relations were? To spread ideas that would benefit ourselves, to create a community in order to achieve what we wanted? I had another example in front of me in hospital, between two and eight, each day.

  When he arrived at two, on the dot, Zaved sat and told me what he’d been up to.

  ‘Oh, I just watched the telly. It was Miranda.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can bear that rubbish,’ I said. ‘She’s not funny at all.’

  ‘She’s so funny! I laughed so much. Come on, she’s really funny.’

  ‘Ha,’ I said. ‘What’s in the bag today?’

  ‘Well, I got you a new pair of pyjamas,’ Zaved said. ‘Three pairs isn’t enough – I’m constantly washing them. It’s only Marks & Spencer.’

  ‘Show me, show me,’ I said. ‘I love new pyjamas. If I were a billionaire, I’d have a new pair of pyjamas every single day. That’s the fourth pair you’ve bought – take some money from my wallet. Come on! Show me!’

  ‘Here you are,’ Zaved said, fishing them out and smiling at my appreciative mewing noise. ‘They’re very boring, really. And I am going to take some money from you, I definitely am. What did you have for your lunch?’

  ‘Fish pie,’ I said. ‘It was gorgeous. And peas! Lovely, lovely peas. I’m loving the food in here. There’s not enough, but I’m loving it. I’m going to go down for some seeds. Or nuts or something. Or chocolate.’

  My husband gave me what could only be called, in an old-fashioned way, an adoring look. I knew he was matching one of mine, in the other direction. ‘Phil, you know you’re not allowed chocol
ate.’

  ‘No, I was joking. What did you have for lunch?’

  ‘There was some leftover biryani from last night at home. I thought I’d have some fish tonight. Why have you got so many books? That’s ridiculous. You’ve only been here three days, and you’ve got twelve books on your bedside cabinet. Are you going to read them?’

  ‘People keep bringing them,’ I said. ‘They know I’m not allowed grapes and they’re not sure about flowers, so they bring –’ I picked up the one on the top of the pile ‘– Tash Aw’s new novel. Nicholas brought that. He’s publishing it next month. It’s about Shanghai. It’s quite good. Did you met him at Mrs Blaikie’s ever – Tash, I mean?’

  ‘I’m reading Edmund White. It’s so nice. All about Jack Holmes and his great big penis. It’s like he’s got a little pet in the house that he needs to take for walks sometimes, in the park. I really like it. Who’s coming today?’

  And so it goes on; in novels dialogue has emotional freight, and as clever readers we learn to interpret the weight of insinuation and understand what unspoken pressures of plotting, what dissatisfaction and desires lurk beneath the surface of words and gesture. Secrets bubble under the surface; one man turns the cheek, the other kisses it, full of concern. One speaks; his words do not mean what is in his heart. We watch, and read, and nod knowledgeably. But my marriage is not like that, not mostly. We live an offstage existence. There is love there, and love, really, doesn’t have to be written about. At no point do we say to each other, our voices rising, a flush coming to our cheeks, ‘What do you mean by that?’ We know what the other means by that.