When the blue bodies get loose they sometimes wander into the clinic itself, as if looking for something. One evening when the fog was at its height, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant took us downstairs to see one. They were keeping it in a small room with white lavatory-tiled walls. It was supposed to have been left on a bench, but when we arrived it had somehow fallen off and got itself into a corner among some old metal cylinders and stretcher-poles. Its face was pressed into them as if it had been trying to escape the light of the unshaded overhead bulb. Dr. Alexandre’s assistant ran his hand through his hair and laughed. What could he do, he seemed to be asking, with something so stupid? He pulled it back on to the table where it lay blindly like a mannequin made of transparent blue jelly.
“Come and touch it,” he encouraged us. “There’s nothing to be frightened of. As you can see it has no internal organs.” It was quite cold and inert. When you touched it there was a slight tautness, a resistance to your fingertip similar to the resistance you would get from a plastic bag full of water; and a dent was left which remained for two or three minutes. When one of the women began to cry and left the room, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant said, “They have no internal organs. They are not alive in any way medical science can define.”
Before he could move away I asked him, “What becomes of the poor things after we have finished with them?”
I lay in bed for three days at the hotel, very ill and depressed, wondering if it was all worth it. To W.B. I wrote, “Why this mania of mine to stay alive? I feel no better. I can’t even go for a walk or eat a piece of cake! I hate myself for hanging on.” When I caught sight of myself in the mirror I was so thin that my shoulder blades looked like two plucked chicken wings. Sleeping fitfully during the day, I dreamed that I had a goiter which drained all the virtues of the world around me. Everything around me grew two-dimensional and unrealistic, while the thing on my neck fattened up like a huge purple plum. I woke up in a sweat and found myself staring out of the window at a square of sky the colour of zinc.
Later I found that someone had telephoned me, but the hotel people hadn’t thought to wake me up. They said they had made a mistake about my name.
At night I could hardly sleep at all. I stared out of the window; listened to the boys singing under the sodium lamps in their mournful, half-broken voices. Far away a man blew inexpertly on a bugle. One boy lifted up the stump of his arm, which looked as if it was covered with black tar. I thought that if W.B. would let me change my mind and start paying for the treatments I might feel less downcast.
The mornings are dark now, and quite cold. You cannot see inside the cafes for steam; it billows over the pavement where people are buttoning themselves into their overcoats. As Winter approaches, and the women wheel their prams a little quicker along the streets by the river, a thin wind rises round Dr. Alexandre’s clinic. Some little-understood property of the new rays, it seems, is rotting the walls of the treatment shed, so that when you get down on the table now you are surrounded at once by little icy draughts smelling of decayed wood. The wallclock, a very delicate mechanism, stopped and had to be replaced. When they opened it up all its working parts were covered with damp furry mould.
Outside Dr. Alexandre’s office window a couple of low shrubs struggle with the desolation of the treatment shed garden, their grayish leaves and waxy orange berries covered with a film of dust or thin mud according to the weather. Inside, the doctor sits impatiently behind a desk piled high with papers, manila envelopes, rubber tubes. Behind him are some green metal shelves, so overloaded with the patients’ files that they curve in the middle. It was raining the afternoon I was there. A desk lamp was burning in the dim room and the crippled girl was staring out across the garden through the streaming window pane. “The doctor wishes to say something to you,” she told me, turning reluctantly to face into the room. “He asks me to say that you must not worry the other patients with questions. It will only hold up your own progress, as well as interfering with theirs. A positive attitude is very important.”
I cleared my throat. “I can see that,” I said cautiously.
The doctor wrote something on the margin of the file in front of him. Suddenly he held up his hand for silence, stared hard at me, and said with great difficulty and slowness: “Matter is cheap in the universe. It is disorganized, but yearns to be of use. Do you see? We do nothing wrong when we create these blue bodies. We violate no laws.” He put the cap carefully on his pen then leaned back in his chair and remained silent for some minutes, as if the effort of speaking English had tired him out. The crippled girl watched me triumphantly from the window.
“I only want to be sure I’m doing the right thing,” I explained. “It’s that I don’t quite understand what happens to them when they’re finished with.”
“Do we not give you these treatments free?” Dr. Alexandre reminded me gently.
After this he made the girl translate for him again while he examined me. “The doctor says you are not making fast progress. You are not sleeping. Why is this? He thinks you should move into the clinic if you wish your treatments to have the best effect. Your disease does not wait. Please do not talk to the other women in the common room. Everything here is humane and legal.”
All I want from life is this room. If I can successfully identify myself with its red candlewick bedspread, the mustard wallpaper and the thin light coming in through the curtains, I won’t have to admit to anything else.
I decided not to move into the clinic. But I couldn’t stand the hotel any longer. When I went to the lavatory in the small hours there was always someone there to stare at my hair or clothes; if I found the courage to complain at the desk about the silverfish in the bathroom, the woman said it wasn’t very convenient for them to have me always asleep in the room during the day. Then W.B. arrived, and there was a fuss about transferring us to a double room. They weren’t going to let us have one at all until I said I would be moving out soon.
At night we lay in bed talking. Suddenly he asked me, “What are you thinking?” and I had to answer, “That I had died and one of our friends had gone to tell you.”
I thought that if I could get furnished accommodation somewhere I would feel better. In furnished accommodation you can sleep all day, come and go as you like. But in Bayswater in November it was difficult. They were all too expensive or they didn’t want single women. At first I didn’t mind. I treated it as a holiday. A tremendous lonely wind blew us up and down the streets, past the cats, milk bottles, and pots of geraniums in basement areas. I felt elated, as if we had recovered something of our youth. Then came a week of really difficult treatments; the rays were more intractable than ever; I was very tired. We started to argue about Dr. Alexandre. W.B. was all for him now. “After all it was your decision to come here.” Soon we were having a blazing row in the hotel lobby. The woman behind the desk watched exactly as if she were at the cinema, nodding slyly to the other guests when they came down to see what was happening.
“You disgust me, stewing in your self-concern!” shouted W.B. I ran out into the street for some air and fell over.
After that I walked around for a while not quite knowing where I was, until I got the idea of going into a gallery and sitting down in front of the first picture I came to.
It showed a woman standing by a yellowish shoreline covered with boulders. The sea was slack and cold. In the background, where the bay curved round into a promontory, some wooden frame houses, and a gray sky streaked with more yellow, were one or two indistinct figures—a man, another woman, perhaps a child in a white confirmation dress—with their backs turned. It had a sort of exhausted calm. I heard myself say quietly: “There is something detestable about all these attempts to preserve yourself.” Once I had understood this a complete tranquility came over me, and I realized I hadn’t felt so well for a long time. I laughed softly. I was hungry. Soon I would get up and run all the way back to the hotel, but first I would have a cup of coffee and perhaps some battenburg cake.
A man in a lovely gray suit came and stood next to me. “It has a certain atmosphere, this one, doesn’t it?” he said. He sighed. “A certain atmosphere.” He had come to tell me the gallery was closing; I saw that it was almost dark outside and suddenly remembered W.B.
When I got up to go I felt odd and a bit tired. The attendant put out his hand to help me and I was horrified to see vomit pour unexpectedly and painlessly out of my mouth all over the sleeve of his suit. I stood trembling with cold, surrounded by the sour smell of it, until they got the name of the hotel from me and put me in a taxi. “At least I didn’t do it on the picture,” I thought on the way back. “At least it was only his sleeve.” In the hotel lobby I found all my cases piled by the door. The woman behind the desk wouldn’t let me go up to my room.
“Your friend left some time ago, I’m afraid,” she said. I stared at her. “If you recall my dear, you did tell us
