Madness Read online

  Slowly she reached into her handbag and took out her spectacles and put them on. Then, holding the pages up high in front of her so that they caught the late afternoon light from the window behind, she started to read:

  This note, my dear Mary, is entirely for you, and will be given you shortly after I am gone.

  Do not be alarmed by the sight of all this writing. It is nothing but an attempt on my part to explain to you precisely what Landy is going to do to me, and why I have agreed that he should do it, and what are his theories and his hopes. You are my wife and you have a right to know these things. In fact you must know them. During the past few days I have tried very hard to speak with you about Landy, but you have steadfastly refused to give me a hearing. This, as I have already told you, is a very foolish attitude to take, and I find it not entirely an unselfish one either. It stems mostly from ignorance, and I am absolutely convinced that if only you were made aware of all the facts, you would immediately change your view. That is why I am hoping that when I am no longer with you, and your mind is less distracted, you will consent to listen to me more carefully through these pages. I swear to you that when you have read my story, your sense of antipathy will vanish, and enthusiasm will take its place. I even dare to hope that you will become a little proud of what I have done.

  As you read on, you must forgive me, if you will, for the coolness of my style, but this is the only way I know of getting my message over to you clearly. You see, as my time draws near, it is natural that I begin to brim with every kind of sentimentality under the sun. Each day I grow more extravagantly wistful, especially in the evenings, and unless I watch myself closely my emotions will be overflowing on to these pages.

  I have a wish, for example, to write something about you and what a satisfactory wife you have been to me through the years, and I am promising myself that if there is time, and I still have the strength, I shall do that next.

  I have a yearning also to speak about this Oxford of mine where I have been living and teaching for the past seventeen years, to tell something about the glory of the place and to explain, if I can, a little of what it has meant to have been allowed to work in its midst. All the things and places that I loved so well keep crowding in on me now in this gloomy bedroom. They are bright and beautiful as they always were, and today, for some reason, I can see them more clearly than ever. The path around the lake in the gardens of Worcester College, where Lovelace used to walk. The gateway at Pembroke. The view westward over the town from Magdalen Tower. The great hall at Christ Church. The little rockery at St John’s where I have counted more than a dozen varieties of campanula, including the rare and dainty C. waldsteiniana. But there, you see! I haven’t even begun and already I’m falling into the trap. So let me get started now; and let you read it slowly, my dear, without any of that sense of sorrow or disapproval that might otherwise embarrass your understanding. Promise me now that you will read it slowly, and that you will put yourself in a cool and patient frame of mind before you begin.

  The details of the illness that struck me down so suddenly in my middle life are known to you. I need not waste time upon them – except to admit at once how foolish I was not to have gone earlier to my doctor. Cancer is one of the few remaining diseases that these modern drugs cannot cure. A surgeon can operate if it has not spread too far; but with me, not only did I leave it too late, but the thing had the effrontery to attack me in the pancreas, making both surgery and survival equally impossible.

  So here I was with somewhere between one and six months left to live, growing more melancholy every hour – and then, all of a sudden, in comes Landy.

  That was six weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning, very early, long before your visiting time, and the moment he entered I knew there was some sort of madness in the wind. He didn’t creep in on his toes, sheepish and embarrassed, not knowing what to say, like all my other visitors. He came in strong and smiling, and he strode up to the bed and stood there looking down at me with a wild bright glimmer in his eyes, and he said, ‘William, my boy, this is perfect. You’re just the one I want!’

  Perhaps I should explain to you here that although John Landy has never been to our house, and you have seldom if ever met him, I myself have been friendly with him for at least nine years. I am, of course, primarily a teacher of philosophy, but as you know I’ve lately been dabbling a good deal in psychology as well. Landy’s interests and mine have therefore slightly overlapped. He is a magnificent neurosurgeon, one of the finest, and recently he has been kind enough to let me study the results of some of his work, especially the varying effects of prefrontal lobotomies upon different types of psychopath. So you can see that when he suddenly burst in on me Tuesday morning, we were by no means strangers to one another.

  ‘Look,’ he said, pulling up a chair beside the bed. ‘In a few weeks you’re going to be dead. Correct?’

  Coming from Landy, the question didn’t seem especially unkind. In a way it was refreshing to have a visitor brave enough to touch upon the forbidden subject.

  ‘You’re going to expire right here in this room, and then they’ll take you out and cremate you.’

  ‘Bury me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s even worse. And then what? Do you believe you’ll go to heaven?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, ‘though it would be comforting to think so.’

  ‘Or hell, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t really see why they should send me there.’

  ‘You never know, my dear William.’

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and I could see him watching me carefully, ‘personally, I don’t believe that after you’re dead you’ll ever hear of yourself again – unless …’ and here he paused and smiled and leaned closer ‘… unless, of course, you have the sense to put yourself into my hands. Would you care to consider a proposition?’

  The way he was staring at me, and studying me, and appraising me with a queer kind of hungriness, I might have been a piece of prime beef on the counter and he had bought it and was waiting for them to wrap it up.

  ‘I’m really serious about it, William. Would you care to consider a proposition?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Then listen and I’ll tell you. Will you listen to me?’

  ‘Go on then, if you like. I doubt I’ve got very much to lose by hearing it.’

  ‘On the contrary, you have a great deal to gain – especially after you’re dead.’

  I am sure he was expecting me to jump when he said this, but for some reason I was ready for it. I lay quite still, watching his face and that slow white smile of his that always revealed the gold clasp of an upper denture curled round the canine on the left side of his mouth.

  ‘This is a thing, William, that I’ve been working on quietly for some years. One or two others here at the hospital have been helping me, especially Morrison, and we’ve completed a number of fairly successful trials with laboratory animals. I’m at the stage now where I’m ready to have a go with a man. It’s a big idea, and it may sound a bit far-fetched at first, but from a surgical point of view there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it shouldn’t be more or less practicable.’

  Landy leaned forward and placed both his hands on the edge of my bed. He has a good face, handsome in a bony sort of way, and with none of the usual doctor’s look about it. You know that look, most of them have it. It glimmers at you out of their eyeballs like a dull electric sign and it reads ONLY I CAN SAVE YOU. But John Landy’s eyes were wide and bright and little sparks of excitement were dancing in the centres of them.

  ‘Quite a long time ago,’ he said, ‘I saw a short medical film that had been brought over from Russia. It was a rather gruesome thing, but interesting. It showed a dog’s head completely severed from the body, but with the normal blood supply being maintained through the arteries and veins by means of an artificial heart. Now the thing is this: that dog’s head, sitting there