‘Anyway,’ said Ellen, ‘they let you out, that’s the main thing. They were just being over-careful. Well, I’m glad they were. I rang the college to say you wouldn’t be in.’
‘They’re running the college on such a mean and cost-effective margin,’ said Bernard, ‘there’ll be no sick cover arranged for me whatsoever. I’d better try and get in this afternoon.’
‘They can’t arrange sick cover for reasons other than meanness,’ observed Ellen, making, as Brenda was glad to see, a cup of tea for her husband. He looked quite pale and shaken but perhaps, Brenda thought, no more than usual. Bernard always had the air of a man to whom a disaster had happened, or was about to happen. ‘They can’t arrange it because teaching staff decline to notify the office as to their whereabouts, let alone their projected absences, their sabbaticals, their leave-takings, legitimate or otherwise as they may be.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ asked Bernard sharply. ‘All of a sudden you’re talking like management,’ and then he seemed to forget that, and gave an account of his breakfast at the hospital; it had come three hours after the ward had been woken, and consisted of a soup plate at the bottom of which some grey fat-free milk swilled, into which a long tube of a kind of cornflakes was to be poured. He had read the tube. The flakes contained one third of the day’s vitamin, mineral and carbohydrate requirements for an adult. There was a slice of thin white bread, already curling, so long it was since it had left the loaf, spread with a kind of non-fat oil, and a cup of warm decaffeinated coffee with a packet of low-protein milk powder to go with it.
‘Poor darling,’ murmured Ellen, preparing toast, butter and marmalade. ‘Poor darling!’
Brenda felt quite weak. Was she meant to endorse her friend’s hypocrisy? She supposed, yes, she was.
After breakfast, Bernard had been told he was in good health; he was told to go home but had to wait for the consultant’s round before his departure could be officially sanctioned. The consultant was delayed, unusually, by an emergency, so Bernard had to sit like an idiot beside his bed, waiting for another couple of hours, fully dressed, while the work of the ward went on around him. He’d wanted to call home but had no change, and his phone card, when he tried it, had no credits left upon it, though he could have sworn it was all but new. The consultant when he arrived was scathing to the ward staff; saying there was no need whatsoever for Bernard to have been admitted: he had merely taken up a badly needed bed. Bernard had made his own way home. He missed the bus by a hair’s breadth and had trod in some dog shit but had stopped in a public toilet to remove it. He had been accosted by two rather aggressive homosexuals—
‘Gays,’ said Ellen.
‘Homosexuals,’ said Bernard—
but had managed to avoid them.
‘Bernard,’ said Ellen. ‘Such a chapter of accidents! I know what you’re thinking: that all this is proof that there is indeed a curse upon you. But I think you imagine it. I don’t expect you got much sleep last night. That’s a perfectly normal hospital breakfast: consultants are always saying things like that to ward staff: many of those phone cards are faulty: you are always missing buses because you’ve got your back turned checking the timetable when they do arrive.’
‘The dog shit was real enough.’
‘No doubt it was. But the dog population of this town is phenomenal. You probably mistook the concern of two perfectly ordinary people in the gentleman’s toilet—you look dreadfully pale—for sexual overtures. Anyway, here you are, safe and sound.’
‘Why do you try and avoid it?’ said Bernard. ‘I have had a curse put upon me by Nerina. Look what’s happening to poor Jed’s wife. There’s no doubt about it at all.’
‘Well,’ said Ellen, ‘this morning I feel singularly blessed, so there you are! I am surprised at you, Bernard. You’re such a rationalist, and here you are talking about curses. I expect you’re still a little shocked after the accident, and somehow the feeling-tone of your childhood has returned. All that heavy, doomy religion. Punishment round every corner.’
‘I expect that’s what it is,’ said Bernard, cheering up. ‘God, I’m glad to be home.’
Brenda made the generalized motions to leave that the wife’s friend is expected to make on the