But they didn’t go. They re-appeared the next morning. It was as if there had been some over-night resolution. Between them, they had a pick-axe, a shovel and a long-handled fork. Perhaps they had been stolen from one of the building sites. They began to discuss something in the near right-hand corner of the playground, looking at the ground and marking out imaginary lines with their feet. Then one of them lifted the pick-axe and, rather clumsily at first, began hacking at the asphalt. It was difficult to see all this. Even with my high vantage point, the near wall partially obscured them. But it was obvious they were digging a hole. When one had wielded the pick-axe for a few minutes another would take over, and at intervals one of them would scrape away the dislodged asphalt and earth with the shovel. The unoccupied ones sat around, looking on silently and intently.
I wondered what all this meant. By mid-day they had dug a hole deep enough to come up to their shoulders and there was a substantial heap of earth on the asphalt. Two of them went off and returned later with other tools—trowels, garden forks, a bucket. All of a sudden, I understood. They were digging a tunnel. The hole was perhaps seven or eight feet from the right hand wall. If they dug towards it and for about the same distance beyond it they would emerge in the little triangle of grass—now almost worn away or dried up by the sun—with the solitary bench on it.
I watched them work on all that afternoon and the next morning. They reached the tricky point where they had to turn the angle of the hole so that they could start to dig horizontally towards the wall. Why were they doing it? Was it a game? Had they transformed the playground, in their minds, into some prison camp, patrolled by armed guards and watch-dogs? Their task was too strenuous for a game, surely. And yet, if it wasn’t a game, it was absurd: They were trying to escape from a place they had entered—and could leave—at their own free will. Suddenly, I wanted them to succeed.
“Look Clancy—” I said. Clancy had come in from work. She had a carton of yoghurt with her. She sat down, ripped off the foil and began eating without speaking. “—a tunnel.”
Clancy looked out of the window. “What tunnel?” All she could see was a pile of earth in the playground.
She licked at her yoghurt, bending her face over it.
“A tunnel. The kids are digging a tunnel in the playground.”
“That’s a stupid thing to do.”
I didn’t explain. We didn’t talk much to each other in the evenings now. It seemed an effort.
For several days I watched them dig. I forgot my hands, my irritation, my uselessness. From where I sat, I could see the goal of their labours—the patch of grass to the right of the wall—whereas they could not. I surveyed their exertions like a god. But there was much that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see how far the tunnel had progressed—all I could see was the expanding heaps of earth and, every few minutes, a boy emerging from the entrance hole, gasping and smeared with soil, and another taking his place. I began to have fears for them. Might the whole thing cave in? Had they dug deep enough to go beneath the foundations of the wall? How were they managing to breathe and to extract the earth as they dug? But now and then I would glimpse things that reassured me: odd bits of wood—fragments of desks and the torn-down lavatories—being used for shoring, lengths of hose-pipe, a torch, plastic bags on the ends of cords. On the asphalt over the estimated line of the tunnel they marked out a broad lane in chalk where, clearly, no one was to stand. Their ingenuity, their determination enthralled me. I remembered the pigeon they had kicked round the playground. But I worried about other things that might still thwart them. Might they run into a gas main and be forced to stop? Might they simply give up from exhaustion? And if they overcame all this, might the council men or the demolition workers arrive before they had time to finish? The more I thought of all these things, the more it seemed that their escape was real: that there was a conspiracy of forces against them and some counter-force in the boys themselves.
I did not want to imagine them failing.
I said to Clancy: “My hands will be better soon.”
“Oh—really. That’s good.”
“It could have been worse. Think of all the worse things that could have happened.”
“That’s right—look on the bright side.”
We were quite apart now, wrapped in ourselves. Clancy spent all her time sweating in the pizza house or brooding over her uncle and his absent letters, and I spent all my time obsessed by the tunnel.
It was nearing the middle of August. The sun kept shining. The evening papers Clancy sometimes brought home spoke of droughts and water restrictions. People were complaining of the fine weather. They would have complained just as much if the summer had been wet. On the little triangular plot by the school the thin grass had turned a straw colour and the earth was hard and cracked. I kept watch on this patch of ground now. At any moment I expected the tunnellers to break surface. In the corner of the playground the diggers seemed to be getting excited. The nearer the moment came, the more I exaggerated the dangers of discovery and I willed the council men to delay one more day. I thought of the difficulty of digging up, entombed by earth, against the hard, baked top-soil.
And then, one afternoon, it happened. It seemed odd that it should happen, just like that, without fanfares and announcements. Suddenly, a segment of cracked soil lifted like a lid, only about five feet from the outer face of the wall. A trowel poked upwards, and a hand, and then, after a pause in which the earth lid rocked and crumbled, a head thrust into the air in a cloud of dust. It wore an expression of serene joy as if it had surfaced in a new world. It lay perched for some time on the ground, as if it had no body, panting and grining. Then it let out a cry of triumph. I watched the head drag out shoulders and arms, and a body behind it; and then the four on the other side of the wall disappear one by one into the hole and re-appear, struggling out, on the grass triangle. No one seemed to see them—the traffic went by heedlessly, the bulldozers whined and growled. It was as if they had been transformed and were invisible. They brushed themselves down and—like climbers on a mountain peak—shook each other’s hands. And then, they simply ran off—down the adjacent side street, past the boarded up shops and the empty terraces—covered in earth, clasping each other and flinging their fists ecstatically into the air.
Clancy came in about an hour later.
“Clancy,” I said, “Clancy, I want to tell you something—” But she was waving an envelope at me, a long white envelope with black print on it. Her face was strangely agitated, as if she might be either pleased or upset.
“Look,” she said.
“Clancy, Clancy—”
“Look at this.”
She took the letter out of the envelope and placed it in front of me. It bore the heading of a firm of solicitors in Ipswich. The letter began with condolences and mentioned the “sad death” of Clancy’s uncle, as if this were something that Clancy should already be aware of, and then went on to speak of “our late client’s special and confidential instructions.” The gist of it was that Clancy’s uncle was dead and Clancy had been left the larger part of his money and property, subject to its being held in trust till she was twenty-one. There were vague, guarded statements about the exact scope of the legacy and a reference to “outstanding settlements,” but a meeting with Clancy was sought as soon as possible.
“Well—what do you think?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Sorry about your uncle.”
We looked at each other without speaking. I didn’t know what else to say. I took Clancy’s hand in my own, half-healed, scabrous hand.
I said: “Clancy, it’s your day off tomorrow. Let’s go out. Let’s go out and get a train to somewhere in the country, and talk.”
Hotel
THE DAY THEY LET ME out of the hospital I went for a long walk round the streets. People looked very remote and sorry for themselves. I noticed there was scarcely anyone who didn’t show some sign of strain, of fe
ar, of worry. And I seemed somehow superior to them, as if they were dwarf people and I was bigger and taller and had a better view than they. And, very occasionally, just here and there, there seemed to be other taller, clearer-sighted people who seemed capable, if they wished, of taking charge of all the others, of directing them and consoling them.
Then I went back the next day, as I’d promised, to say goodbye to Dr. Azim, who’d been called away on the day they discharged me. I said to him, “I want to tell you how much I’m grateful for what you’ve done. And I want to say how much I admire the work of you and your staff.” He smiled and looked flattered. I continued my farewell speech. “I see now,” I said, “where I went wrong. It’s all very clear. You have to be one of those who cares for others rather than one of those whom others care for. It’s simple.” Then I said, “I’ve been happy here.” And Dr. Azim beamed, and shook hands with me when I left. And I knew then that one day I must occupy some hospitable and protective role like his.
I spent over three months in the hospital, from a time shortly after my mother died. The police picked me up on the street because I was shouting things out loud and alarming passers-by. They thought I was drunk or on some sort of drug. But when they found out neither was the case they took me to see Dr. Azim and his colleagues.
It’s strange that I should have been delivered at the hospital doors by the police, because at first so much of what was called my “therapy” seemed to resemble criminal investigation. It was as though I were a suspect and the important thing, to save everyone time and trouble, was for me to make a clean breast of it. The doctors would conduct little question-games, like interrogations, and when I failed to come up with the right answer, they would sigh disappointedly, pump me full of tranquilizers and wait for the next session. I seriously wondered if at a certain stage they would resort to tougher, harsher methods.
So it was a relief to myself as well as them when I said: “The fact is, I wanted to kill my mother.”
In one sense I don’t think this changed anything. Merely saying it. But my doctors seemed pleased and started to busy themselves on my behalf; and from that day my relations with them changed. They became more friendly, they started to take me, as it were, into their confidence. And from that day too I began to admire them.
Only one thing seemed to disappoint them, and that was the way I failed to give a satisfactory answer to their further question: “Why did you want to kill her? Didn’t you love her?”
It was the second part of it that upset me. My first instinct was to be angry with them. I loved her very much. But I saw how this would trap me. So I started to tell them how when my father left us, three years ago, Mother and I had to look after each other. How, considering everything, we were happy, and I was even rather glad (though I didn’t tell them this) that Father had gone. And when I got a bit older, I started to get these feelings, hard to explain, that mother wanted to do me harm. I got scared of her and angry with her, and then as the feelings got worse I started to wish she was dead. And then she really did die. She was knocked down in the High Street, by a car which, so they told me, was hardly going at any speed. But she died. I had to go to the hospital to identify her.
Then my doctors said, “But if you were frightened of your mother, if you thought she would do you harm, why didn’t you leave her?” I didn’t answer that. When things got to this point it would be time for one of my injections.
So I never told them exactly why I wanted to kill Mother, but perhaps what I did tell them gave them plenty to be getting on with, because, as I say, our relations improved. We would often talk about my “problem” as if we were talking about some third person who was not present. I stopped having my gabbling and shouting fits, or my sessions of weeping inconsolably because of my dead mother. I was told by Dr. Azim, who had taken charge of my case, that I was making progress. And I agreed.
Once I said to Dr. Azim: “So is that what it amounts to? I’ve been put in here—people think I’m mad—because I wished to kill my mother?”
Dr. Azim smiled and gave an expression which suggested that this was taking a naive view.
“No, it’s not your wish to kill your mother that’s brought you here. It’s your guilt about that wish.”
So I said to him: “Does that mean then that the answer would be to have your wish.”
He smiled again. He had a reassuring smile.
“It’s not as simple as that. There are wishes, and there are wishes …”
Then there followed a period of five or six weeks—which I still look upon as one of the sweetest in my life—when, with my main course of therapy over, I was required only to recover slowly, like any convalescent after an illness. It was summer and I spent a lot of time sitting on the hospital lawns, observing the other patients, talking to Dr. Azim, and thinking about this business of guilt and secret wishes.
It seems to me that there can scarcely be anyone walking the earth who doesn’t carry with him some measure of guilt; and that guilt is always the sign of some forbidden happiness. Somewhere inside everybody’s guilt is joy, and somewhere within everybody’s unhappy, guilt-ridden face is happiness. Perhaps there’s no way out of this. And yet there must be someone who will try to understand our guilt and not blame it; there must be places where we can go where our secret wishes can be uttered and our forbidden dreams catered for. There must, in a word, be care.
And then I felt privileged to be where I was, and very proud to have met Dr. Azim and his colleagues; and I had the feeling that perhaps every recovering inmate experiences, of being an honoured and fortunate guest. So perhaps it was then, and before that first walk out of the hospital gates, that the ambition was sown in me that would one day make me a hotel-keeper.
But don’t think I walked out of that hospital with a worked-out plan for something which, of course, was then quite beyond my reach. My efforts matured slowly. For many years I ran a small café, bought with the money mother left me—no different from countless other cafés. I made a point of getting to know my customers, of making them feel that they could talk to me and I would listen; and some of them appreciated this, though some of them took exception and never came back.
Don’t think, either, that a lot of time didn’t pass and a lot of living didn’t get done between the day I left the hospital and the day I opened my hotel. I got married. My wife helped me with the café and even put her money towards it. It’s true, our marriage didn’t work out. It wasn’t happy. But I’d learnt to take a balanced view of unhappiness. My wife—Carol—often told me that I treated her like a child; I patronised her, talking down to her. The strange thing was it seemed to me to be the other way round.
When we got divorced, I decided not to marry again. I bought a new café in a nicer suburb with rooms above it so it could be used as a guest-house. For a long time—until it began to pay—I ran this virtually single-handedly, which was hard work. But I was good at it. I had a natural flair, I’d discovered, for catering—cooking, making beds, attending to laundry—I’d learnt it in those years with Mother. I don’t think I was ever lonely, not having a wife. You’re never lonely in the café and guest-house business, with people to look after. After a while I could afford a couple of permanent staff, and this enabled me to take the odd half-day off—to visit Mother’s grave, to go to look up Dr. Azim, though I was saddened to learn that he had retired through ill-health, and his whereabouts were unknown.
So many years went by, dull, if busy, years on the face of it. But I always felt I was only waiting, marking time. My ambition of a hotel was crystallizing. And I knew there would come a time when that long period—over thirty years in all—between my leaving the hospital and owning my hotel would seem unimportant, a preparation, a mere journey between two points.
Because you see, if I haven’t made it clear already, my idea of a hotel wasn’t just the crowning of a career in catering, the next step up from high street café and small-time guest-house. It was a genuine idea. I had no inte
rest in providing mere board and lodging, though, God knows, I could provide that. I wanted a hotel that would be like my old hospital without its department of health notices. A hotel—of happiness.
And at last, after waiting, saving and searching, I found it: a twelve-bedroomed establishment in a west country town, beside a river. The former proprietors, local people, seemed to have lacked imagination and failed to see its potential. Within five years I had transformed it into a haven where people came, summer and winter, for what I used to call—and many of my guests were taken by the phrase—“therapeutic visits.” I think it owed some of its success—which is not to be modest—to the presence of water. The restaurant looked out across a lawn with white painted chairs and tables to the river, and there was not a room in the building in which could not be heard the soft rushing of a nearby weir. People like to be near water. It gives them a feeling of being cleansed, of being purified.
But there are plenty of small hotels beside rivers in pleasant country towns, and these things alone don’t explain the special charm my hotel had. I still like to believe it had a special charm. I like to believe that when people stepped through the entrance of my hotel they felt at once they were in the hands of someone who cared. Somehow I knew that “out there,” in the lives they came from, there were all kinds of things—guilty things—that they would be reluctant to admit to and came to escape from. And somehow they knew that I knew this and that I understood and didn’t blame or condemn. And in the meantime I offered them a week, a fortnight, of release. When I talked to them—because I always tried to get my guests to speak—they would sometimes laugh over matters that before, I am sure, they might have cried about or not dared to broach, and this atmosphere of candour, of amnesty, was all part of the cure.
Of course, there are always those who don’t want to talk and give away nothing. But faces show things. People always smiled in my hotel, even if they checked in with tired and reticent expressions. And if all this isn’t proof enough, I only have to quote the list of guests who returned to my hotel over and over again, sometimes several times in the same year, or the affidavits of those who wrote to me personally to say how much they enjoyed their stays. A lot of these people, I don’t mind admitting, had money and influence. But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that they were grateful to me, they were loyal to me, they appreciated what I was doing.