The Proper Procedure and Other Stories Read online

  The Proper

  Procedure

  and other stories

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Copyright © Anthony M. Daniels, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher except by reviewers who may quote brief passages in their reviews.

  Published by New English Review Press

  a subsidiary of World Encounter Institute

  PO Box 158397

  Nashville, Tennessee 37215

  &

  27 Old Gloucester Street

  London, England, WC1N 3AX

  Cover Art and Design by Kendra Mallock

  ISBN: 978-1-943003-11-2

  E-Book Edition

  NEW ENGLISH REVIEW PRESS

  newenglishreview.org

  To the memory of

  Dr Alan James Gardner (1936 - 1987)

  1 - Bildungsroman

  And she had left her native country – the land of poets and thinkers – for this!

  Life in Percy Bysshe Shelley House, a concrete tower opposite its identical twin, Harold Laski House, was growing more and more intolerable. It had always been lonely there, of course, stuck up on the fourteenth floor, knowing no one, the traffic swirling far below, oblivious; but the city was so expensive that she could afford nothing better than a council flat, though she had always worked and had never had a day off sick, not in the thirty-five years since her arrival in England just after the end of the war. Not like the natives.

  Always unattractive, Percy Bysshe Shelley House was now hell on earth. Miss Falkenhagen doubted whether any of its residents other than she even knew who Percy Bysshe Shelley was. What a country! The people couldn’t even speak or spell their own language properly, and hardly knew that any other languages existed. They knew nothing of their own literature and cared even less; their pleasures were coarse and brutish, their food revolting, their manners, if such you could call them, appalling. It was not so much that they lacked refinement, these people; rather they hated refinement and persecuted it wherever they found or even suspected it.

  Miss Falkenhagen spoke better English than they and took pride, in her capacity as secretary, in never making a spelling mistake – unlike her native-born colleagues, who felt neither pride nor shame in their work. It was for that reason that she couldn’t bring herself to befriend them, for what profit would there have been in doing so? Quite apart from the mental slovenliness that their lack of pride indicated, what did they talk about other than what was on the television the night before, their convoluted personal lives and their clothes? Thin mental gruel indeed for someone as intelligent as she; and it was absolutely typical of them that, though obsessed by clothes, they should be so badly dressed.

  But even they were not as bad as the residents of Percy Bysshe Shelley House, for they were merely empty-headed rather than malicious. To what, other than malice, could one attribute the male residents’ propensity to urinate in the common parts and in the lifts of the building, impregnating the edifice with an irremovable ammoniacal smell? They were not old men with prostate disease who could hardly be blamed for losing control of their bladders, but on the contrary strapping young men in the peak of condition. Surely even when drunk (as, of course, they often were, as often as they had the opportunity) they could have waited another minute or two to relieve themselves? No, they did it from sheer hatred of their fellow-residents, or perhaps, like dogs, to signal their control of the territory. How pathetic!

  But worse than the smell was the noise. This wasn’t just a question of slamming doors and the odd quarrel, the sound of which was transmitted into her flat by the thinness of the internal walls: partitions would be a better words for them really (Miss Falkenhagen took pleasure in fine verbal distinctions, especially in her adopted language). She could have tolerated that. No, it was the music, or rather the so-called music, that they played, night and day. One must not exaggerate, she thought, especially because of where she came from; but the fact is that the deep base rhythm that caused the whole building to vibrate, and the wild vocalisings that these barbarians called singing, reminded her of the inescapability of poisoned gas. Even Bach and Mozart would not have been welcome at high volume at two, three or four in the morning: but this, this eternal caterwauling, this sub-dionysian frenzy of savages, was insufferable. She had tried, without success, to do something about it.

  Of course, one could not approach the barbarians directly. At best they would laugh in your face, at worst attack you or wreak revenge on you; it was certainly no good appealing to their better nature, for they had none to appeal to. They did not understand, or did not care, that some people had to work in the day and therefore needed to sleep at night; they were nocturnal creatures, sleeping by day and occupying themselves with their loud uncouth amusements by night. How they could afford to live like this was a mystery to Miss Falkenhagen; she supposed it must be a combination of social security and drug-dealing. Certainly one noticed needles abandoned in the stairwell when one was obliged to walk up the stairs while the lifts were restored after a particularly destructive bout of vandalism.

  Miss Falkenhagen had tried the police but, short of murder, they were uninterested in what went on in Percy Bysshe Shelley House. There had indeed once been a murder there, in the course of a dispute between two young men over which brand of tracksuit was best; in the circumstances you could hardly blame the police for having come to the conclusion that there was little, except for the matter of timing, to distinguish a criminal from his victim. It was silly, therefore, to expect the police to exert themselves over so trivial a problem as that of continual loud music. As the police telephonist told Miss Falkenhagen when she called, it was a matter of manners, not law. Somewhat inconsistently, she also suggested that Miss Falkenhagen try the Housing Department, that is to say her landlord.

  She had done so. After considerable hesitation and with much reluctance, the Department agreed to measure the noise by means of a recording device affixed for twenty-four hours to one of the walls of Miss Falkenhagen’s flat. For some reason, the device had recorded nothing, as if Percy Bysshe Shelley were a Trappist monastery. Miss Falkenhagen protested against this evident absurdity, and demanded that the device be deployed again; but she was told that resources were limited, complaints were many, and the device was needed elsewhere. Only one bite of the cherry was allowed, she was told; besides (this by way of consolation), there was little anyone could have done about it even if the device had recorded the most terrific racket. After all, even the noisy had to live somewhere.

  England hadn’t been like then when she arrived, thought Miss Falkenhagen. She had come because her own country, the land of poets and thinkers, had been so thoroughly bombed-out that it seemed impossible that life there could ever consist of anything other than sifting among the rubble in search of useful oddments and meals of potato peelings. Life in the victor, England, was no doubt much less comfortable than it had been before the war, but it was positively a life of luxury by comparison. She seized the opportunity to move, therefore, when it presented itself, even if it meant (as it had) that she would never see her parents again.

  She saw now that it was a terrible mistake that she had made, and that she should have stayed where she was born and brought up. In the intervening years, the position of the two countries had reversed; what had been the promised land had become the cursed land, and vice versa. Poverty had become prosperity, and prosperity poverty. When she peered out of her window, she saw a city-scape that looked as if it had undergone bombardment by a new kind of weapon, one that spread c
oncrete, brown-greyness and ugliness everywhere. It was inhuman, inhuman! You couldn’t really blame anyone for behaving like a predatory beast in it.

  Miss Falkenhagen began to brood. It was too late now in life to change anything very much: how insouciant one was in youth, believing any mistake or error to be retrievable because of the infinite stretch of time before one! No; in the words of that cliché (but clichés were what they were because they were true), she had made her bed and now she would have to lie on it.

  She began to suffer stomach pains. She had always been healthy before, ascribing the illnesses of others to the filthy diet they ate and to their bad habits. She herself had needed no encouragement to eat healthily, for it had never occurred to her to do otherwise. It was not only inconvenient and alarming that she should be attacked by stomach pains, therefore, it was unjust.

  She was reluctant to consult her doctor because she did not trust him. She had nothing personal against him, indeed she hardly knew him; it was just that she found it difficult to believe that the doctors produced by so crude and debased a country could be up to the scientific, intellectual and ethical level that real medical practice required. However, she had little choice in the matter. She had nowhere else to turn.

  The doctor listened to her without evincing much interest. You might have supposed from his attitude that she was a chronic complainer, or the kind who regarded a visit to the doctor as the highlight of her week. He didn’t even examine her; he simply took a pad and wrote a prescription on it. ‘Take these,’ he said, ‘twice a day before meals.’

  It was hardly surprising that she got no better. The pills did nothing except give her eructations that savoured slightly of peppermint. It was as she thought: like everything else in this country, the doctor was of low quality, sloppy and careless. But, having once consulted him, she was not prepared to let him off the hook. She returned to him several times in search of a diagnosis, if not of a cure.

  Eventually he took her blood and even examined her, though only because of the reproachful intonation of her questions and her reminder that she was of an age when serious things began to happen to people. His examination was not thorough, and he touched her as if she were distasteful to him, as rotting meat might have been. It was obvious that he couldn’t get it all over with quickly enough.

  When she had put her clothes back on, he looked, or squinted, at her through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Do sleep at night?’ he asked.

  Miss Falkenhagen described the throb of the music, so-called, through the fabric of the building, and how it rendered her sleep fitful.

  ‘And can you concentrate?’

  It was an odd thing to ask, but Miss Falkenhagen had to admit that of late she found it difficult to do so. When she settled down to a book, for example, scenes of her early life kept appearing in her mind, and she forgot what she had just read. Things didn’t stick, which was most unpleasant for someone of her serious nature. No doubt some people, who had nothing much in their minds anyway, did not mind being unable to concentrate; but for her, now she came to think of it, it was a kind of torture.

  ‘I’d like you to see a colleague of mine,’ said the doctor. ‘A specialist.’

  ‘What kind of specialist?’ asked Miss Falkenhagen.

  ‘I think you’re depressed,’ said the doctor hastily. ‘A psychiatrist.’

  ‘A psychiatrist!’ said Miss Falkenhagen. ‘What has he to do with pain in the stomach?’

  The doctor was uncomfortable, as if suffering from a guilty conscience.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the fact is that the mind is indistinguishable from the body – and vice versa, of course.’

  Miss Falkenhagen remained silent.

  ‘The mind can affect the body,’ he resumed. ‘Let me give you an example. If you suddenly saw a cobra by your feet you might lose control of your bowels. Your fear is a purely psychological state, but the effect on your bowels is physical. Of course, this is a very crude example but it illustrates what I mean. Mind and body are inseparable, and their interactions can be very subtle.’

  Miss Falkenhagen shifted a little on her chair, but at least she did not interrupt.

  ‘These days,’ continued the doctor, ‘there is no prejudice against mental illness. It is just the same as physical illness. No one would blame you for having ulcerative colitis, say, and no one blames you for being depressed.’

  Well, thought Miss Falkenhagen on her way home, as the English say, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ – not that the pound was worth much these days, but then neither was the consultation with the psychiatrist likely to be.

  About two weeks later Miss Falkenhagen received through the post an appointment to attend the Mary Lamb Mental Wellness Clinic. On the day appointed she slipped on her winter coat and left Percy Bysshe Shelley House in an almost furtive way, as if anyone could have told where she was going just by looking at her.

  The Mary Lamb Mental Wellness Clinic turned out to be a low, rectangular brick building, obviously intended as temporary but long since having become permanent, in the grounds of the Leafields Psychiatric Hospital (formerly County Asylum). These grounds had once been extensive, but were being whittled away by financial necessity: which, perhaps, was just as well, since one of its residents a few years previously had used access to laurel bushes to distil a liquid containing cyanide, which he then administered to his fellow-sufferers.

  Miss Falkenhagen entered through a metal framed door with windows in whose glass there was a wire mesh. The receptionist at the counter nearby was embroiled with a man of about sixty in an ancient pullover and very stained trousers whose cut bore little relation to his waist, buttocks or legs, and which were kept in place by several belts composed of string.

  ‘Now, Cyril,’ said the receptionist with a mixture of compassion and exasperation, ‘you know that you’re not supposed to be here, it’s out of bounds. Go back to the ward.’

  ‘Got a fag?’ said the man called Cyril.

  ‘Only if you go back to the ward.’

  ‘Giss a gag, giss a fag,’ said Cyril, holding out his hand.

  ‘All right then,’ said the receptionist. ‘But then you must go back to the ward.’

  Cyril grabbed the proffered cigarette like a hungry beast and then turned to go out, brushing past Miss Falkenhagen, who shuddered, partly sincerely and partly to demonstrate as clearly as possible that she was not like that.

  The receptionist asked her to wait: Dr Brown would be with her in a moment.

  Miss Falkenhagen had hardly had time to flick through the old magazines in the waiting room, and wonder how people could be content to fill their minds with such trash, when Dr Brown called her into his room. She was so surprised by his appearance that she took nothing else in about the room.

  She had been expecting a middle-aged man at least, someone on the verge of retirement and at the acme of his wisdom: perhaps even a pipe-smoker. Instead, Dr Brown was a very young man, handsome, well-dressed without ostentatious attention to his appearance, slightly above average height and with a manner that, while confident enough, was not over-confident.

  ‘I was expecting someone older,’ said Miss Falkenhagen.

  ‘I am Dr FitzGerald’s assistant,’ said Dr Brown. ‘I discuss each case with him.’

  His frank and open acknowledgement that he was not the chief reinforced Miss Falkenhagen’s favourable impression of him. Only someone who was sure of his own worth, in a healthily unobtrusive way, could admit without difficulty that he was not the most experienced or important man round here, the one who decided everything. Miss Falkenhagen decided that she would get on with him.

  Dr Brown was not excessively interested in the details of Miss Falkenhagen’s abdominal discomforts. He assumed that serious pathology had already been excluded. And, indeed, his conversation with her seemed hardly medical at all, which again spoke much in his favour, for it indicated that he considered Miss Falkenhagen a perfectly intelligent and sensible person – which
, of course, she was. It almost felt as if she were talking to a friend rather than a doctor. He didn’t interrupt her, except for minor points of clarification, and altogether showed himself as a cultivated man of the kind Miss Falkenhagen always wanted to meet but (living where she did) met so rarely. You could see on his face that he was interested in her not as a case but as a person; and it was true that her life history was really out of the ordinary. You wouldn’t think it from her current restricted way of life, but she had been witness to great events: for example, did Dr Brown know that she had once seen Hitler in person? Indeed, she was the member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel chosen to present him with the bouquet of flowers in front of the excited crowd that lined the street to greet his historic visit to their town. On the day, however, she had gone down with tonsillitis, and therefore someone else – a girl called Elfriede – had to supply her place. The residents of Percy Bysshe Shelley Tower knew nothing of her past, said Miss Falkenhagen, and were so wrapped up in their own sordid and petty day to day affairs that they would not even be interested in it. But what stories she could have told them, had they been interested! She was, after all, a witness to the most important years of our era. The fact that she had not been important, just an ordinary child growing up as if those years were perfectly normal (for a child, having no standard of comparison) accepts what goes on around him as being in the nature of things, eternal, unchanging and unchangeable, added rather than detracted from the interest of her memories – in her opinion, though of course she understood that Dr Brown might think otherwise.

  ‘No, no,’ protested Dr Brown. ‘I think you’re quite right.’

  ‘There were other Nazi bigwigs who came to our town,’ said Miss Falkenhagen, glad at long last to have met someone educated, intelligent and imaginative enough to take an interest in what she had to tell.

  ‘You should write it down,’ said Dr Brown.

  His words acted almost as an electric shock on Miss Falkenhagen, for they coincided exactly with her deepest inclination. She had long thought that her memoirs would be of surpassing interest and historical importance, for the time would come, quite soon in fact, when there would be no one left to record the kind of memories that she had. Moreover, having read as much as she had, she was sure she would be able to write them down with literary grace and elegance – and in a language not her own!