Reality and Dreams

Houghton Mifflin Company

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The first thing he discerned when he regained consciousness was a woman in white. This angel was calling him by his first name, Tom, although they had never been introduced.

'Are you a nun?' he said.

'No, I'm Jasmine. I'm a nurse. Come on, Tom, I've got to wake you up. I've got to put this other pillow under your head. And lift the top part of your bed. Like this ...' She manipulated with her foot a lever of the hospital bed so that he was slightly raised. 'Otherwise,' she said, 'you might feel groggy.' She stuck a thermometer in his mouth before he had time to speak, and took his wrist in her hand, looking at her watch. He saw by her watch that it was twenty past twelve. The sun was visible behind the curtains, so it must have been daytime.

He dozed off while she was still counting his pulse. When he woke half an hour later as it seemed, it was dark, it was ten-forty at night as he learned from the new nurse, the night nurse, name of Edna so she told him. So does our trade direct our perceptions and our dreams he thought: Tom was a film director. Cut into the scene of the morning with the scene of the evening. The same nurse, but was it the same? Anyway it was Edna and the same scene.

'Where's the doctor?' Tom said.

'He looked in this afternoon. Were you awake?'

'Perhaps.' Tom wasn't sure. He thought he might remember a doctor's face looming over him.

Edna let his bed down by manipulating the lever. There was a drip inserted in his foot that he had been aware of since he woke but hadn't been able to remark on. Edna was nearly black of skin. 'Where do you come from, Edna?' 'Ghana,' she said, or was he mixing her up with someone else? When he woke it was the daylight of early morning.

Enter a lady in white, this time with a head-veil. 'You are one of the nuns?' She was. She was Sister Felicitas come to take a sample of his blood.

'They took my blood already,' he said.

'That was your urine.'

'What are you going to do with my blood?'

'Drink it,' she said.

'What time is it?'


'How can you be so larky so early in the morning?'

'It's late. We rise at five.'

'Was that you singing? I heard singing.'

'That was us in the chapel.'

She was gone in a whisk of white. In came his breakfast tray, supporting it seemed, dusky Edna.

'Do you call this breakfast?'

'First you get liquid, then soft, then solid.'


He was now thinking of the plans he had made, the vow he had taken, before his operation. He intended to keep it.

'Good morning.'

Two women came in with a mop and pail. One dusted while the other slopped the floor of that room in the international hospital. Now two nurses came to make his bed. They got him up. They helped him through to the bathroom. They shaved him with expert hands. Oh go on shaving, it's nice. But then they unplugged the razor. Someone had put an enormous bunch of flowers on the far table, a mixture of roses, lilies and asters, most remarkable and expensive.

The surgeon: You're going to be all right.

What did he mean, I'm going to be all right? So earnest. I never thought I wasn't.

Beside his bed a table on wheels, moveable to any convenient angle. On the table was a telephone. Good, I will wait till I feel a bit stronger, after the liquids and the soft.

'When will I be on solids, Edna?'

'I'm not Edna, I'm Greta. You have solids tomorrow.'

'Greta, where do you come from?'


He felt like a casting director. Greta is absolutely built for the part. But which part?

The telephone rang.

The difficulty of his turning to lift the receiver was solved by Greta who wheeled the table to an angle where the phone was close to hand.

'Yes?' His voice croaked.

'Is that you, Tom? Tom, is that you?'

'I suppose so. I'll be on solids tomorrow.' He was actually wider awake than he wanted anyone to know.

'I suppose I can come and visit this afternoon?'

'No, tomorrow.'

Claire, Tom's wife, arrived in the afternoon. He hadn't yet told her the plans he had made. She would be intrigued by them but not anxious. That was one advantage of having a very rich wife. You could make plans without her worrying immediately how it was going to affect her budget. Tom once had a wife who referred back every action, every thought of his, to her budget. She was much happier divorced with a well-paid job of her own.

He had a belly-ache. Came Sister Benedict with her injection.

'Tom! ... Tom! ...'

Claire was by his bed, smiling, holding his hand. 'You're going to be all right,' she said.

Nobody had said he wasn't.

He said, 'I want to see Fortescue-Brown.' That was his lawyer, full of fuss and business, never letting you get a word in. I only keep him, thought Tom, because I am too genuinely busy to change.

'Fortescue-Brown!' said Claire.

'Yes, Fortescue-Brown,' he said.

'At a moment like this you want to see Fortescue-Brown?'

'That's right,' he said.

She pulled up a chair and sat close to his bed, pushing the wheeled table out of the way. When he looked again only the chair was there and a nurse was coming in with a tray of filthy supper.

'What is your name?'


'Well, Ruth, I can't eat that white soup.'

'What would you like to eat? I'll ask for something else.'

'I am straining every muscle in my imagination to think of something else. Forget it.'

'You have to keep your strength up,' said Ruth. She had a tiny waist and an enormous backside. He couldn't keep his eyes off it. She was about thirty with straw-coloured hair drawn back, and a pale face. She would have cast well as a German spy in those old days of yore. She disappeared and to his amazement came back with an egg en cocotte which he consumed absent-mindedly.

'Are you expecting any visitor this evening?' Ruth had come to take away the tray. By her watch it was half past six.

'My daughter, Marigold, an unfrocked priest of a woman.'

Marigold was suddenly there.

'Well, Pa, I hear you're going to be all right,' said she, with her turned-down smile, skinnily slithering into a chair and arranging her coat over her flat chest. She should never have married. No wonder her husband James had decided to write travel books.

'How's James?' Tom said.

'So far as I know he's in Polynesia.'

'I said how, not where.'

'Don't wear yourself out,' she said, 'with too much conversation. I bought you some grapes.' She said 'bought' not 'brought'. She dumped a plastic bag on the side table. 'This is a wonderful clinic,' she said. 'I suppose it costs a fortune. Of course nothing should be spared in a case like yours.'

You must not imagine Marigold was particularly deprived.

In the morning Tom rang Fortescue-Brown and made an appointment for him to come to the clinic at three in the afternoon.

Love and economics, Tom mused. 'I have always,' he thought, 'considered them as opposites. Why do they continually bump into each other as if they were allied topics? Is it possible that what I call love isn't love?'

He was touched that lovely Cora his daughter by his first wife had flown into London to see him. She had obtained leave for the occasion from whatever she was doing in Lyons for Channel Four. Her first words were 'Pa, you're going to be all right.' She went on to say how her husband, Johnny, had been declared redundant at his job, an administrator in Parsimmons & Gould the paint people. She continued that she had managed to get a cheap bucket-shop flight to see him. 'And what,' thought he, 'has Johnny's redundancy got to do with me, my broken ribs and thigh? And her cheap flight? Did she come for love or what?

'And I am glad,' he continued in his mind, 'that Johnny has been made redundant. I am glad with the gladness of the lover of truth: the man has always been superfluous.'

He said, 'Marigold has been here.'

'I know,' said Coral.

'She brought me some grapes,' Tom put in experimentally.

'I know,' said Coral. 'Don't you want to watch the news?'

There was a television in the corner, stuck up on the wall, and a controller by the side table. Tom switched it on. A Nigerian politician being interviewed -- 'Democracy,' he said, 'is not a one-man cup of tea.' Tom switched off.

'Are you in pain?' said Fortescue-Brown.

'Yes, indeed, Mr. Brown, I am.'

'Now, Tom,' said he, 'reflect. You are getting angry again. Angry and arrogant. There was no need, no need at all, for you to go up on that crane. An ordinary dolly is perfectly all right for directing a motion picture these days. But no, you have to be different, you have to be right up there beside the photographer, squeezed in, and without a seat-belt. You have to be God.'

'Are you suggesting that God wears a seat-belt?'

'Nothing, nothing would surprise me after being your lawyer for twenty years. When do you get out of this penitentiary?'

'Next week, but I have to take two nurses home with me.'


'One for day and one for night. Is it your money or mine?'

'I told you to take out an insurance.'

'Well I didn't. Find some money. Scratch around.'

He was no sooner out of the door than Tom chucked a tumbler full of water at the door, so that Fortescue-Brown could hear it. Broken glass and water all over the place. There was something else he had wanted to say to the lawyer, but never mind. There was a vow. But what vow?

As the cleaners mopped it up Tom smiled sweetly at them. 'It just flew out of my hand as I sat up.'

'Don't try to sit up, Mr. Richards. Just ring the bell.'

Tom lay thinking ... Yes, I did feel like God up on that crane. It was wonderful to shout orders through the amplifier and like God watch the team down there group and re-group as bidden. Especially those two top stars and the upstart minor stars, with far too much money, thinking they could direct the film better themselves. There was none of the 'Just a minute, may I suggest...' that held up my work constantly on the floor. Right up there I was beyond and above pausing a minute and listening to their suggestions. What do they think a film set is? A democracy, or something? I simply don't regret that crane for a moment. All I want to know is who fouled us up. Who made the wheels hiccup on the tangle of wires, so that I was thrown clean off, crash. Twelve ribs and a broken hip, and lucky, very lucky, to be alive.

(C) 1996 Muriel Spark All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-395-83811-8

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