CHAPTER NINE

 

Today, even the Children's Hospital brought Mr Stoyte no consolations.  The nurses had welcomed him with their friendliest smiles.  The young house physician encountered in the corridor was flatteringly deferential.  The convalescents shouted 'Uncle Jo!' with all their customary enthusiasm, and, as he paused beside their beds, the faces of the sick were momentarily illuminated with pleasure.  His gifts of toys were received as usual, sometimes with noisy rapture, sometimes (more touchingly) in the silence of a happiness speechless with amazement and incredulity.  On this round of the various wards, he saw, as on other days, the pitiful succession of small bodies distorted by scrofula and paralysis, of small emaciated faces resigned to suffering, of little angels dying, and martyred innocents and snub-faced imps of mischief tortured into a reluctant stillness.

      Ordinarily it all made him feel good - like he wanted to cry, but at the same time like he wanted to shout and be proud: proud of just being human, because these kids were human and you've never seen anything so brave as they were; and proud that he had done this thing for them, given them the finest hospital in the State, and all the best that money could buy.  But today his visit brought none of the customary reactions.  He had no impulsion either to cry or to shout.  He felt neither pride, nor the anguish of sympathy, nor the exquisite happiness that resulted from their combination.  He felt nothing - nothing except the dull, gnawing misery which had been with him all that day, at the Pantheon, with Clancy, in his downtown office.  Driving out from the city, he had looked forward to his visit to the hospital as an asthma patient might look forward to a dose of adrenalin or an opium-smoker to a long-postponed pipe.  But the looked-for relief had not come.  The kids had let him down.

      Taking his cue from what had happened at the end of previous visits, the porter smiled at Mr Stoyte as he left the hospital and said something about it being the finest bunch of great little kids he ever knew.  Mr Stoyte looked at him blankly, nodded without speaking, and passed on.

      The porter watched him go.  'Jeepers Creepers!' he said to himself, remembering the expression on Mr Stoyte's face.

 

      Mr Stoyte drove back to the castle feeling as unhappy as he had felt when he left in the morning.  He went up with the Vermeer to the fourteenth floor; Virginia was not in her boudoir.  He went down to the tenth; but she was not in the billiard-room.  He dropped to the second; but she was being neither manicured nor massaged.  In a sudden access of suspicion he descended to the sub-sub-basement and almost ran to see if she were in the laboratory with Pete; the laboratory was empty.  A mouse squeaked in its cage, and behind the glass of the aquarium one of the aged carp glided slowly from shadow into light and from light once more into green shadow.  Mr Stoyte hurried back to the elevator, shut himself in with the Dutchman's dream of everyday life mysteriously raised to the pitch of mathematical perfection, and pressed the topmost of the twenty-three buttons.

      Arrived at his destination, Mr Stoyte slid back the gate of the elevator and looked out through the glass panel in the second door.

      The water of the swimming-pool was perfectly still.  Between the battlements, the mountains had taken on their evening richness of golden light and indigo shadow.  The sky was cloudless and transparently blue.  A tray with bottles and glasses had been set on the iron table at the further side of the pool, and behind the table stood one of the low couches on which Mr Stoyte was accustomed to take his sun-baths.  Virginia was lying on this couch, as though anaesthetized, her lips parted, her eyes closed, one arm drooped limply and its hand lying palm upwards on the floor, like a flower carelessly thrown aside and forgotten.  Half concealed by the table, Dr Obispo, the Claude Bernard of his subject, was looking down into her face with an expression of slightly amused scientific curiosity.

      In its first irrepressible uprush, Mr Stoyte's fury came near to defeating its own homicidal object.  With a great effort, he checked the impulse to shout, to charge headlong out of the elevator, waving his fists and foaming at the mouth.  Trembling under the internal pressure of pent-up rage and hatred, he groped in the pocket of his jacket.  Except for a child's rattle and two packets of chewing-gum left over from his distribution of gifts at the hospital, it was empty.  For the first time in months he had forgotten his automatic.

      For a few seconds Mr Stoyte stood hesitating, undecided what to do.  Should he rush out, as he had first been moved to do, and kill the man with his bare hands?  Or should he go down and fetch his gun?  In the end, he decided to get the gun.  He pressed the button, and the lift dropped silently down its shaft.  Unseeing, Mr Stoyte glared at the Vermeer; and from her universe of perfected geometrical beauty the young lady in blue satin turned her head from the open harpsichord and looked out, past the draped curtain, over the black-and-white tessellated floor - out through the windows of the picture-frame into that other universe in which Mr Stoyte and his fellow-creatures had their ugly and untidy being.

      Mr Stoyte ran to his bedroom, opened the drawer in which his handkerchiefs were kept, rummaged furiously among the silks and cambrics, and found nothing.  Then he remembered.  Yesterday morning he had worn no jacket.  The gun had been in his hip-pocket.  Then Pedersen had come to give him his Swedish exercises.  But a gun in the hip-pocket was uncomfortable if you did things on your back, on the floor.  He had taken it out and put it away in the writing-desk in his study.

      Mr Stoyte ran back to the elevator, went down four floors and ran to the study.  The gun was in the top left-hand drawer of the writing-table; he remembered exactly.

      The top left-hand drawer of the writing-table was locked.  So were all the other drawers.

      'God damn that old bitch!' Mr Stoyte shouted as he tugged at the handles.

      Thoughtful and conscientious in every detail, Miss Grogram, his secretary, always locked up everything before she went home.

      Still cursing Miss Grogram, whom he hated at the moment almost as bitterly as he hated that swine there on the roof, Mr Stoyte hurried back to the elevator.  The gate was locked.  During his absence in the study, somebody must have pressed the recall button on some other floor.  Through the closed door he could hear the faint hum of the machinery.  The elevator was in use.  God only knew how long he would have to wait.

      Mr Stoyte let out an inarticulate bellow, rushed along the corridor, turned to the right, opened a swing-door, turned to the right again and was at the gate of the service lift.  He seized the handle and pulled.  It was locked.  He pressed the recall button.  Nothing happened.  The service elevator was also in use.

      Mr Stoyte ran back along the corridor, through the swing-door, then through another swing-door.  Spiralling round a central well that went down two hundred feet into the depth of the cellars, the staircase mounted and descended.  Mr Stoyte started to climb.  Breathless after only two floors, he ran back to the elevators.  The service elevator was still in use; but the other responded to the call of the button.  Dropping from somewhere overhead, it came to a halt in front of him.  The locked door unlocked itself.  He pulled it open and stepped in.  The young lady in satin still occupied her position of equilibrium in a perfectly calculated universe.  The distance of her left eye from the left side of the picture was to its distance from the right side as one is to the square root of two minus one; and the distance of the same eye from the bottom of the picture was equal to its distance from the left side.  As for the knot of ribbons on her right shoulder - that was precisely at the corner of an imaginary square with the sides equal to the longer of the two golden sections into which the base of the picture was divisible.  A deep fold in the satin skirt indicated the position of the right side of this square, and the lid of the harpsichord marked the top.  The tapestry in the upper right-hand corner stretched exactly one-third of the way across the picture and had its lower edge at a height equal to the base.  Pushed forward by the brown and dusky ochres of the background, the blue satin encountered the black-and-white marble slabs of the floor and was pushed back, to be held, suspended in mid-picture space, like a piece of steel between two magnets of opposite sign.  Within the frame nothing could have been different; the stillness of that world was not the mere immobility of old paint and canvas; it was also the spirited repose of consummated perfection.

      'The old bitch!' Mr Stoyte kept growling to himself, and then, turning in memory from his secretary to Dr Obispo, 'The swine!'

      The elevator came to a stop.  Mr Stoyte darted out and hurried along the corridor to Miss Grogham's empty office.  He thought he knew where she kept the keys; but it turned out that he was wrong.  They were somewhere else.  But where? where? where?  Frustration churned up his rage into a foam of frenzy.  He opened drawers and flung their contents on the floor, he scattered the neatly filed papers about the room, he overturned the dictaphone, he even went to the trouble of emptying the bookshelves and upsetting the potted cyclamen and the bowl of Japanese goldfish which Miss Grogham kept on the windowsill.  Red scales flashed among the broken glass and the reference-books.  One gauzy tail was black with spilt ink.  Mr Stoyte picked up a bottle of glue and, with all his might, threw it down among the dying fish.

      'Bitch!' he shouted.  'Bitch!'

      Then suddenly he saw the keys, hanging in a neat little bunch on a hook near the mantelpiece, where, he suddenly remembered, he had seen them a thousand times before.

      'Bitch!' he shouted with redoubled fury as he seized them.  He hurried towards the door, pausing only to push the typewriter off the table.  It fell with a crash into the chaos of torn paper and glue and goldfish.  That would serve the old bitch right, Mr Stoyte reflected with a kind of maniacal glee as he ran towards the elevator.