THE FIRST heavy snowfall of the year, a huge heart appeared on the bowling-green next to the hospital grounds. It was deeply marked out in the snow, and for sheer size – as seen from the height of the new hospital buildings – it was an eye-opener. It was the biggest shape that could be put inside the green without running over onto the surrounding paths; and whoever made it had been careful not to spoil his line. He had walked narrowly backwards, foot behind foot, and let his stick swallow up most of his prints. There was a line of chunky footsteps leading up to it, a line leading away, and no other marks.
The bowling-green was not connected with the hospital. High hedges made it private. Yet it was visible only from the hospital windows. All during summer and up till late autumn, when the green was closed, old men bent and swung their arms over a lawn smooth as a billiard table. Patients and visitors to the hospital were used to the sight of an endless turnover of players. There were bowlers strong as bulls down there as well as old men on their last legs. There were bossy bowlers and browbeaten bowlers. But whatever they were, domineering or defeated, the place was geared to age. Overnight the snow and the heart had changed all that. While the old men had been sleeping or sitting in their clubs or pubs their place had been smoothed out and engraved. A rejuvenation had taken place, and they were to know nothing of it.
The hospital staff were too busy in the morning to do much more than glance at the bowling-green in passing. It was left to the afternoon visitors who were always in the high corridor on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and at week-ends, waiting to be beckoned into certain medical and surgical wards on the stroke of three. The place where they waited was at the top of the building – a wide corridor with a staircase and a line of lifts at one end. Opposite were the swing doors leading through to the wards. On the window side it was almost entirely glass divided up by strips of metal and it was here that visitors lined up while they waited. They varied from day to day but most of them were long-distance people who had arrived early. Amongst these were the few who came to visit long-term patients and who formed a small in-group amongst the random coming and going of the rest. They were a clique who had their own private and sometimes silent language. They recognized one another and formed bonds even though they might have no clue to the other end of the attachment – the man, woman or child in the beds beyond.
On this particular afternoon half a dozen or so were waiting at the windows. They were glad, in a businesslike way, to see the snow. They were glad to see the heart. Any new thing at all on the way to the wards was something to be grateful for and visitors to long-term patients had to be particularly skilled collectors of news items, no matter how small or unimportant. Delivery of news was always a chancy affair. There was no knowing how long their patients might take over the bits they were given. Events which should have provided talk for an hour could be brushed aside in a matter of seconds. Patients had been known to listen lackadaisically to news packets containing a cease-fire and a new war, and grasp at the tale of a bad egg in a bowl. Today the early visitors at the window were too tired to go overboard for this heart. They had seen better last minute talking-points in their time. All the same they took it and filed it amongst other items where, with luck, it might fill a gap. While most of them collected it silently and turned to other things, one man remarked to the woman beside him that he would be telling his son about this.
‘He’ll be amused when I tell him,’ he said. ‘I mean the grotesque size of that thing will intrigue him.’ It was a grave mistake indeed to make any pronouncement on what would or would not amuse or please one’s patient. Few experienced visitors risked it. But there was a desperate streak in this man. The woman listened pleasantly to him and said that no doubt she too would be telling her daughter. But she knew it was a very different matter. The man’s son had been here a long time and he would not get better. Her daughter, in a surgical ward, was getting better every day. Occasionally the man talked about his son, though rarely about his illness.
‘He is rather difficult to please,’ he had said one afternoon a few weeks earlier. ‘He’s inclined to find fault.’ And some time after he had said: ‘You know, he is very, very difficult to please. He finds fault with everything and everyone.’
‘Poor fellow,’ she had replied.
‘And I’m afraid I irritate him,’ said the father.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But of course it’s not really you.’
‘I don’t know whether it’s really me or not me. I just know I seem to irritate him more and more every day.’
One way or another the woman had got to know a bit about this man. His wife was dead, and there were not many other people to share the visits with him. His son, who had just finished his architect’s training, had one good friend who wrote regularly from his new job in Canada. A few other friends took turns to visit him. Some had stopped for good. He’d had a girl friend once but she had disappeared early in his illness. ‘Naturally enough – or unnaturally, whichever way you want to look at it,’ said the man. There was this difficulty about hospitals and long-term visitors felt it most. As they went on it grew harder and harder to figure out what was natural and what was unnatural about the set-up. And it was not only the place which set them problems. They worried about themselves. Were they becoming less human or more human? And which was best under the circumstances? They sank and surfaced again, alternating in mood with those in the wards who sank and surfaced continually. The boy’s father had been depressed himself for some time. But this afternoon he seemed cheerful, as though the snow, by levelling cracks and ridges and smoothing all anomalies of building and landscape, had made it possible to start again from the beginning.
The bowling-green was not the only thing visitors could look down at. The hospital was built round three sides of a large courtyard, and down there was a new fountain with two fish mouths which would one day blow water. There were a few newly-planted saplings, and three small flower beds sunk in the paving-stones, ready for planting. Triangles and oblongs of red, blue and yellow enamel had been set in a pattern along the side of the concrete wall which ran under the hedge on the bowling-green side. But the visitors, like ungrateful children, never looked at these things – or if they did it was only momentarily before staring above and beyond at scenes not intended for them. They looked across at the windows of the west-wing wards. There they could see distant figures in beds – spry figures sitting bolt upright, half-reclining figures with knees sharply angled under red and blue blankets, and flat-out figures. The corridor people never wearied of this spectacle. It seemed that the people in the distant beds were more interesting and more mysterious than their own relatives in the nearby wards. This afternoon they looked across and saw the scene transformed. Bits of the outside world had invaded the inside. Nurses were moving about over there with caps white as the snowcaps on the chimney-pots. They were bouncing up pillows which were smaller versions of the fat snow-pillows below. A few outgoing scarlet capes were moving along the path towards the gates. It was not only the boy’s father who was cheered. The others also felt hope in the air, though it was mixed with ice. They were anxious that it should not melt too quickly.
On the stroke of three the swing doors burst open and were fastened against brass hinges on either side. They were being beckoned in by a familiar, smiling nurse. But the man stayed behind talking with the woman for a few minutes longer. He was telling her something and it was easy enough to guess what was happening. He was no more telling it to her than he was telling it to the fire extinguisher. He was simply rehearsing in detail what he would tell his son.
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he was saying, ‘I’d no sooner got in than my neighbours came round for a chat, and to tell me about their latest bed-and-breakfast. They do it summer and winter – have done for years. And do you know who this latest man turns out to be? A first-class chef turned preacher. Imagine it. He’d been giving people a great deal of pleasure, no doubt, whipping up the soufflés and concocting recipes à la Robertson or whatever his name is. And now …! Not only that, but he can’t leave well alone. He’s got to go round condemning his former job. Condemning it! Oh, that
