Russell Hoban - Angelica's Grotto

‘Just pop this under your tongue for me,’ said Staff Nurse Francesca as she gave him a disposable thermometer and put the blood-pressure sleeve on his right arm. Klein had mentally undressed her several times; her skeleton was the perkiest of the day staff. ‘Whuzzu lasname, Fruzzhezza?’ he said.

‘Miller.’ She brought her bosom and name badge closer. ‘You’re losing the thermometer.’

‘Schubert wrote a song cycle about a beautiful miller girl,’ he said when he was able. ‘What’s my blood pressure?’

‘One-ten over fifty. My boyfriend gave me a recording of it with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.’

‘That’s a bit low for me,’ said Klein. ‘Does he know about wine?’

‘Funny you should say that. He’s just bought a book about it. Finger.’

He gave her a finger and she pricked it for a drop of blood which she caught on a B-M stick. ‘We go to wine-tastings sometimes. Fourteen point five.’

‘That’s a little excessive,’ said Klein.

‘It’s fun though,’ said Francesca. She put the glucose monitor back in its box and breezed off in a zephyr of pheromones.

Klein was still shaking his head appreciatively at her going-away view when a queenly Yoruba woman with cheek tattoos put menu forms on his table. ‘What’s good?’ he said.

She gave him a sphinx-like smile. ‘Everything.’

Torn between cottage pie and lasagne, he was whispering his options into his hand when the phlebotomist appeared, a Chinese woman with a serious face. ‘Harold Klein?’ she said. ‘Date of birth: four, two, twenty-five?’

‘That’s me.’ He offered his arm and made a fist as she applied the tourniquet. ‘The blood is the life,’ he said.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘if you knew how tired I am of Dracula jokes …’

‘Sorry.’ He read her name badge as the needle went in: Pearl Epstein. ‘Ever use the I Ching?’

‘No, and don’t ask me what my star sign is, OK?’ She filled both vials and put a wad of absorbent cotton on the site. ‘Press on this.’

Klein pressed. She labelled the vials, then secured the cotton with a strip of tape. ‘Taurus,’ he said.

Epstein registered surprise. ‘What made you say that?’

‘My first wife was a Taurus.’

She gave him a hard look, gathered up her tray and was gone.

‘These inscrutable Epsteins,’ Klein whispered.

There were six beds in his bay, arranged in two rows of three. At four of them platoons of family and friends clustered with grapes, oranges, apples, bananas, pears, plums, chocolates, biscuits, Lucozade, orange squash, Coca-Cola, Ribena, and mineral water. Some went down to the shop for further supplies while others of them chatted, read, knitted, and gave comfort in cockney and one or two other languages.

Klein had the bed nearest the door in his row. His opposite was a man in his early sixties who, like Klein, was without visitors. He was sitting, fully dressed, in the chair by his bed. At his feet was a blue holdall from which he took a map. He unfolded the map and perused it hurriedly, tracing some route with his finger; then he refolded it, stuffed it back in the holdall, stood up, and hurried anxiously from bed to bed on his side of the room, murmuring, ‘Where is it?’ He then came back down the line on Klein’s side, returned to his chair, looked at the holdall, said, ‘Here it is,’ sat down again, took out the map, and ran his finger over it once more.

‘I know the feeling,’ said Klein.

‘Where’s Ealing?’ said the man. He had an Australian accent.

‘That’s west London — you can get to it on the Underground.’

‘But I’m not,’ said the man.

‘Not what?’

‘Going to Ealing.’

‘I never said you were.’

‘You said, “Why go to Ealing?”’

‘No, I said, “I know the feeling.”’

‘Of what?’

‘Not going to Ealing, if you like.’

‘With or without a bike, I’m not going.’

‘Righty-oh,’ said Klein, giving him a smile and a thumbs-up sign as Melissa appeared, elegant in her little black frock. Beds Three and Five reached for their inhalers as she aimed herself at him.

‘Here you are,’ she said, and gave him a long and intimate kiss.

‘What’s this?’ said Klein when he found his tongue. ‘Has God suddenly declared a Happy Hour?’

‘I was worried about you, Harold. When you left the auction you looked not long for this world. You’re still very pale. How are you feeling?’

‘Great. They had to tether me to this machine to make the ward safe for the nurses.’

‘No, really, was it a full-scale heart attack? Have you got any pain now? What are they going to do with you?’

‘It was a small-scale heart attack. I haven’t any pain now. I’m waiting for an angiogram and when they’ve had a look at that they’ll decide what to do next. What happened with the painting?’

‘It went to a telephone bidder for £1,250,000.’

‘A million and a quarter! Mr Las Vegas was right — UFOs, alien abductions, and big money for mystics.’

‘Wasn’t Redon a Symbolist?’

‘That’s the label they’ve stuck on him but a mystic is what he essentially was. Your last bid was a million, right?’

‘Right.’

‘You’ve got a lot of balls, Melissa.’

‘Fortune favours the bold, Harold, and one of these days you’ll be getting a cheque for £1,164,062.50 which is better than a kick in the head from a dead horse.’ She made a circuit of the bed, sliding the curtains along the rails until Klein was closed off in a private cubicle.

‘What’s happening?’ he said as she came to his bedside.

‘Physiotherapy.’ She took his right hand, moved it up under her skirt and clamped it firmly between her legs. No knickers. ‘I want you to get well soon; you’ve got a lot to live for.’

‘You mean, I’m a successful old fool?’

‘Success is certainly within your grasp. Keep doing that, you’re looking better already.’

‘Melissa, why are you being so nice to me?’

‘You’ve got the quids, I’ve got the quos. I can be bought.’

‘Ah, it’s just business then, nothing personal.’

‘Not entirely; I can’t be bought by just anybody.’

‘I’m honoured.’ He removed his hand.

‘Don’t be hurt, Harold; I’ve told you before this that everything’s business in one way or another: that’s what makes the world go around.’

‘It certainly seems to be going around faster than it used to.’

‘You’re keeping up with it pretty well. When you’re back to full strength we can talk about the future, but for now you should get lots of rest. Can I bring you anything?’

‘Could you get me some things from home?’

‘No problem. Give me a list.’

She sat on the edge of the bed while he made the list, her bottom touching his leg. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘here I am in hospital after a heart attack and I feel more alive and in the world than I’ve done in years, just because you’re sitting on the edge of my bed.’

She touched his cheek. ‘You mustn’t get too fond of me, Prof — I don’t want to break your heart.’

He kissed her hand. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t.’

The curtains slid back as a male technician arrived with an ECG machine.

‘I’m off,’ said Melissa. ‘I’ll be around tomorrow with your things.’ She slid her hand under his pillows, kissed him and left.

When the ECG was done and the technician gone Klein reached under the pillows and found Melissa’s black silk knickers. ‘Hard sell,’ he said; he held them to his face for a moment, then put them in his locker.

At three o’clock in the morning the ward was fully itself, a place of darkness behind the membrane of apparent reality, a realm where nothing was certain and everything in doubt, an enclave of enforced intimacy where strangers hawked, spat, snored, farted, and peed in bottles while nurses ministered to them in stealth and whispers. Klein, now on the third of Patrick o’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, was in the foretopmast crosstrees of HMS Surprise, considering, with Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey, ‘the ship thus seen as a figure of the present — the untouched sea before it as the future — the bow wave as the moment of perception, of immediate existence’. The frigate was before the wind, her motion long and easy; the swing of the topmast as she pitched was hypnotic.