describe precisely what happened is a delicate, perilous undertaking, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it may not be beyond me. The scientific attitude to which I have for decades been faithful, with its strict notions of objectivity, etc., has come under heavy assault since the accident. Cracks have appeared, and from out of those cracks grin monstrous anomalies. I cannot subdue them. I have become superstitious. I am subject to “sightings.”
I suppose I shall have to describe the circumstances surrounding the accident sooner or later. Frankly, I would rather do it later; the whole incident still causes me intense embarrassment and pain, because Fledge, you see, was present when it occurred, he was instrumental, in fact, in causing it. I shall render a full account of all this in due course. Suffice for now that after I regained consciousness I went through a very morbid period indeed, for it is terrifying to will to move and remain inert, and it is terrifying to experience the sense of disorder this inertia produces. And although in time I began to negotiate some sort of commerce with objective reality, to adapt, during my first days in hospital I was afflicted by, of all things, a sense of failure. I would lie in the darkness, trapped in the dungeon of my own skull, which throbbed like a jackhammer, and I would strain with every fiber of my being just to lift the little finger of my right hand. I threw all my resources into lifting that pinky a tenth of an inch off the bedsheet. This would intensify my headache to the point that I expected my head quite literally to explode, but the damn pinky would not move, and after some minutes I would be seized, first, with the utmost sense of despair and futility, and then with shame at my own failure. This was in the early days, as I say, before I began actively to accept that I was a man without a body. Later of course I came to terms with my condition. This was not courage but instinct, pure instinct, the will to survive, and I share it with all living organisms. There was, though, this period when it seemed to me that if I never moved again it would be my own fault, because I had not tried hard enough. Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.
Oh, but the back door is open, the birds are singing, and the sunshine of the afternoon is puddling warmly on the old gray stones. It is springtime now, and the damp days of that awful February are behind us. Cleo, I notice, is indulging a bizarre new hobby of hers, collecting nail clippings in a matchbox, and Doris, who is operating the scissors, pauses now and then to sip her sherry. A scene of pleasant domestic tranquillity, then, and frankly it’s hard for me to keep my mind on gnawed bones and dismembered corpses. “Now your toenails,” says Cleo, and the pair of them get down on their hands and knees to remove my shoes and socks. I derive enormous pleasure from this ritual, indeed from any situation in which I am physically touched, though feeling their fingers on my feet is ticklish, and I should giggle like a child if I were capable of it. “What smelly feet you’ve got, Daddy,” says Cleo. “Like a pair of old Cheddars, aren’t they, Mrs. Fledge?”
Doris is giving me her lopsided smile. Dear Doris, I would much rather think about her than about dead Sidney and his pig-gnawed bones. Doris for me is the source of life now. She feeds me. She washes me. She changes me, she dresses me. She coos and burbles over me like the fondest young mother. And I, devoid of any other physical contact with the world, have come to crave and adore the touch of her hands on my body, I have come to love everything about the woman, even the smell of drink on her breath and the intoxicated fumblings of the night. I cry sometimes when I am with Doris, when she handles me tenderly in the bathroom or the lavatory, but it never occurs to her, as it has to Cleo, that crying should be impossible for a vegetable. This is because she does not see me as others see me, in terms of my brain damage. I am her baby.
Dear Doris. I haven’t told you about my return to Crook; it could hardly be called triumphant. My condition had apparently “stabilized”—“fossilized,” I should have said. I could sit in a wheelchair, masticate and swallow, defecate, weep—and that, in terms of physical activity, was it. I had an alarming tendency to grind my teeth, and sometimes my breathing would become heavily labored—I would snore, in fact, while wide awake. I noticed that this snoring occurred when I thought about painful topics, like Fledge, and hence I would snore much of the day, though in sleep, apparently, I was quiet. (Such reversals were common, in my life as a vegetable.) At moments of vivid emotion the snores would become increasingly strained and build towards a crescendo of honks and grunts, at which point I would be forced to abandon thought altogether and concentrate hard on bringing my respiration back under control; nurses would run over to clap me violently on the back. It was this phenomenon that provoked Walter Dendrite, my neurologist, to refer to me publicly as a pig. But the point is, Doris volunteered to look after the snorting monster I had become; she agreed to perform the services of a mother to me, and for this I love her.
Harriet and Hilary traveled back to Crook with me in the ambulance. Harriet no longer burst into tears every time she laid eyes on me, the doctors had seen to that, I’d heard them murmuring at the foot of my bed. In fact, it was one of the most striking aspects of that first stage of my vegetal existence, the experience of seeing my family’s reactions shift from grief and compassion to acceptance and apparent indifference in a remarkably short period of time. Thus, I notice, are the dead forgotten; thus are persons in my state rendered tolerable. For who can look long upon a creature whose one stark message is: see how close you are to grotesquerie. Our kinship with the grotesque is something to be shunned; it requires an act of rejection, of brisk alienation, and here the doctors were most cooperative, for they permitted Harriet and the rest of them to reject my persisting humanity by means of a gobbledygook that carried the imprimatur of—science! Science! And this is not the least of the ironies with which this tale of mine is so liberally peppered—science proposes, this is how I had lived, but science also disposes, and now I found myself frozen, stuck fast, like a fly in a web, in the grid of a medical taxonomy. My identity was now neuropathological. I was no longer a man, I was an instance of a disease, and as such I could no longer arouse the profound pity I so richly deserved. I don’t think they gave me very long to live, frankly. They knew about my ticker and its sclerotic arteries. I imagine if I’d been an Eskimo they’d just have pushed me out into a blizzard, and that would have been that. I wouldn’t have minded, or rather, I wouldn’t have minded if I could have taken Fledge out into the blizzard with me. Then I’d have died a happy man. Did I mention that the appalling Patrick Pin had been hovering at my bedside when I regained consciousness? It seems that Harriet, fearing for my life, had had him administer Extreme Unction. That was not all: I now sported a small crucifix on a silver chain around my neck. I would be safe from vampires, in any event. Ha!
But the point is, my return to Crook was remarkable for what it taught me about the nature of hope. Bear with me, please, the pertinence of these remarks will soon become clear. Fledge, you see, had wheeled me from the ambulance to the house, and down the hall to the drawing room, and as he’d done so it had been impossible not to be aware of a quite sickening aura of triumphalism that clung to the man like a smell, that seeped malodorously from all his wretched pores. He put me against the wall, facing the fireplace, and left me there.
Now Crook, as Sidney’s mother had so astutely remarked to Harriet on New Year’s Eve, is a house of wood; and despite the fact that it is falling down, it retains strong character precisely because it is wood. The staircase and all the floorboards are of oak, as is the wall paneling, which is dark, and makes the rooms snug and warm. The doorframes are also wood, and have a lovely shallow arch to them, delicately cusped at the center. The front door is divided into studded panels, but decoration is otherwise limited to the tops of the wall panels and the downstairs skirting boards. Around the chimneypiece in the drawing room, however—and my wheelchair, as I say, had been placed so that I gazed directly at it—there is some very elaborate work. It is in fact a masterpiece, a masterpiece of Tudor low-relief carving.
A pair of oak columns flank the fireplace, supporting an entablature, or superstructure, comprising architrave, frieze, and cornice. The projection of the latter forms the mantelpiece, and upon it the design of the entire fireplace is repeated, though naturally in greatly reduced proportions. There is thus an echo upon the mantelpiece of the whole fireplace—can you picture it?—and whereas the space between the lower columns is the open grate itself, in the carving above are displayed the arms of the Coal family (Chimaera, salient, gules on sable) and beneath them our motto: NIL DESPERANDUM.
Nil desperandum. Since I was a boy I’ve felt that those words were meant for me. At times of crisis—in Africa, for instance— they have given me strength. It’s surprising, is it not, how much solace can be had from two words—literally, “there is no reason to despair”? Perhaps they matter so much to me because I have a very real tendency to despair. It runs in the family: Sir Digby Coal was a suicide, and Cleo, I’m very much afraid, appears also to have a melancholy cast of mind; along with the teeth she gets it from me. But for four centuries the words over the fireplace, standing, perhaps, in allegorical relation to the fire beneath, have helped my forebears to struggle against their innate inclination to give up hope. These words have warmed their souls, while
