Rupert Thomson: The Insult

A big round moan rose from Smulders’ lips –

‘ Ch -Ch. . Ch -Ch. . Ch -Ch. . Ch -Ch. .’

— but he could not resist: ‘The train now departing …’

I tiptoed back to bed.

He kept it up for more than an hour. There were the usual time-tables. There were details of various connections. And there was something new — a convoluted explanation of the reason why a commuter train scheduled for an 18.04 departure had been cancelled, together with an appropriately long-winded apology. I lay there imagining the people massed in front of the departures board, their faces at angles of forty-five degrees. They’d be fuming . I smiled and turned on to my comfortable side.

The last thing I heard before I fell asleep that night was a reminder that smoking was forbidden on all platforms. I imagined that Smulders, with his great appetite for cigarettes and the freedom, presumably, to smoke them in his office, must always have relished that particular announcement.

‘You have a visitor,’ Nurse Janssen told me.

Visser stood beside her. I detected an exchange of glances that I didn’t understand. The thick air of conspiracy hung around my bed.

‘Someone to see you,’ Nurse Janssen said.

I raised myself a little higher on my pillows. ‘Oh?’

‘It’s your fiancée, Claudia.’

She’d visited before, apparently, while I was either medicated or unconscious. I’d been told how she would sit beside my bed with one of my hands in both of hers. A lovely girl, Claudia; that was the general consensus. It had even been suggested that her devotion had helped to pull me through.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I didn’t like people gushing, I never had; I didn’t like mindless sentimentality — and it surprised me to discover that not only Nurse Janssen (predictable, perhaps) but also Visser (Visser!) might be prone to it. And as for the idea of someone holding my hand without me knowing, it suddenly struck me as a violation, an obscenity — even if that someone was my fiancée.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’ Nurse Janssen said.

‘Where is she?’ I said.

They led me to a room I’d never known was there. It didn’t seem to belong with the draughty, antiseptic corridors and hallways of the clinic. Smelling of sponge cake, wood-polish and cut flowers, it was more like the drawing-room in a country house. I waited for Claudia in an armchair by the window.

Before too long she came quietly into the room and sat down in the chair next to mine.

‘You look just the same,’ she said.

I turned to face her. ‘I can’t see you.’

I was lying, of course. I’d asked them to dim the lamps in the room before they left. They probably thought it was for reasons of modesty or romance. It was nothing of the kind. It was so I could look at her.

She began to cry.

I studied her closely. Her narrow knees were pressed together and her head was bowed. She’d altered her hairstyle, drawing it sleekly back behind her ears. She’d fastened it with a piece of dark velvet. The colour was hard to make out against the light, but I imagined it was purple. She’d always liked purple.

Her shoulders shook inside her cardigan. I felt sorry for her, but in the way you might feel sorry for a stranger you saw crying in a public place — sitting beside a fountain, say, or standing at a bus-stop. There was nothing personal about it. On the contrary, I felt removed from her. Distanced. I felt so distant that I was almost curious to know the reason for her tears.

At last, she sat up straighter in her chair. She wiped her face with a hand that seemed clumsy; it was as if she’d lost the use of it, as if it had been broken at the wrist. That slender wrist. There was a time when it had meant something.

She apologised for not visiting me during the past few weeks. She’d had examinations. She reminded me that she was studying to be a lawyer.

‘Did you pass?’ I asked her.

‘Yes.’ She nodded.

I congratulated her.

Outside, it was September. The wasps on the windowsill were drowsy, and there were fires burning in the fields beyond the clinic wall. I saw Visser and Janssen walking through the orchard, among the pear trees, her dark head bent, his moustache mysterious in the half-light.

After a long silence, and so abruptly that I jumped, Claudia offered to come and live with me. She’d cook, she’d clean. She’d see to my every need. Her face tilted eagerly.

I tried to conceal my horror.

‘What about your career?’

‘I’d give it up.’ She lowered her voice. ‘For you.’

I found myself launching into a speech; it was completely unrehearsed, but the way it flowed from my lips without any prompting or effort, I might have been practising for months. I couldn’t possibly ask such a sacrifice of her, I said. Since the shooting and the operations that followed it, I’d become erratic, demanding — even violent. In short, I’d changed. And I couldn’t bear to burden her with such responsibility. She should leave me now, today, avoiding what would only be a far more painful parting in the future. I had, in any case, never been good enough for her — I held up a hand as she tried to interrupt — my father a post-office clerk in the provinces, now retired, hers a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Education. Leave me now, I told her, while our memories were unblemished, while we still had respect for one another and were free of bitterness and resentment, while we could still avoid recriminations. After all, she had her whole life in front of her (yes, I actually used that line!). She should find some young man who could provide her with the kind of future she deserved. I’d be better off with my doctors and nurses — people who understood my condition, and were trained to deal with it. As I was talking, I realised what an enormous relief it was to be able finally to put an end to our relationship. I’d just been waiting for a good opportunity, the right excuse. I wondered how long it would’ve taken if I hadn’t been shot in the head. Years, probably.

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘if I don’t show you to the door.’

She began to cry again, her mouth crumpling, curving downwards, despite her efforts to straighten it, as if there were tiny weights attached to the corners.

I turned away from her, gazed vaguely into the room. I even wobbled my head a little, the way blind people often do. I heard her gather up her coat and rush out.

With Claudia gone, some kind of atmosphere or trance appeared to lift, its departure smooth, almost imperceptible — one level of reality shedding another. It reminded me of lying in bed at night when I was young. Sometimes a car passed and its headlamps entered the room. The way the block of light slid along the wall. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the car in the street outside or the sound of an engine. And yet the two were linked. That was the feeling I had suddenly. I was no longer sure why I’d acted the way I had. I hardly recognised myself. Was this the new personality they’d been talking about? If so, wasn’t it rather early for it to be manifesting itself? Where was the numbness, the anaesthesia? Where were the suicidal thoughts?

I sat in my armchair, staring at the fireplace and breathing steadily.

At last Nurse Janssen came to fetch me. She was surprised that Claudia had left before visiting hours were over. She’d thought that every moment would be precious. No time goes faster, she told me, than the time that star-crossed lovers spend together.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The voice of experience.’

I’d like to have heard her on the subject. I’d like to have known the truth about her and Visser. Were they involved? And, if not, what were they doing walking practically hand in hand among the pear trees? But she would not be sidetracked. All she was interested in was how I’d got on with Claudia. One or two of her nursing colleagues had joined us in the corridor. They were all clamouring to know.