Jott

by Sam Thompson

Genres: Friendship; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In February of 1935, two young Irishmen walk in the grounds of a London mental hospital. Arthur Bourne, a junior psychiatrist, is about to jeopardise his future for his closest friend, an aspiring writer called Louis Molyneux.

Arthur has been overshadowed since childhood by his brilliant, troubled friend. But after years of playing the unassuming companion, he is learning that loyalty has its costs: that old friendship may thwart new love, and perhaps even blur distinctions between the sane and the mad . . .

Jott is a story about friendship, madness and modernism from the author of the Man Booker-longlisted Communion Town.

Release date: June 14, 2018

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

They walked in the grounds in silence. Meeting at the gate, it had been apparent that Louis was not in a talking mood, so Arthur, saying nothing, had fallen in step beside him, and in the time since then they had not spoken. Instead their shoes scraped on the path and the crows called in the trees. The Calvary might have been deserted.

The silence was not yet a long one, but the urge to speak was growing. He could ask after the work, reckless as that would be, or he could try Venn, or offer some morsel of medical life. The woman he had seen on admission this morning would appeal to Louis’s taste, no doubt, having come here from a penitential retreat where after fasting and watching for three days and nights she had seen the devil scuttling for her along the floor of the dormitory. But he kept pace with Louis and said nothing, and the need eased. The discipline was meeting these moments when they came and passing through them into deeper silence.

They turned on to a path that led away from the main cluster of buildings, through stands of trees, past the nurses’ houses and towards the woodland at the edge of the grounds. His fingers were numb, but he knew better than to suggest giving up the walk. The paradox was that for Louis to make the journey into the deep silence he craved, he needed a companion. To be silent alone just meant having no one to talk to, but to stay unspeaking with your friend beside you was to choose the silence, so that when you walked together wordlessly for hours, tracing and retracing these footpaths in cold mist, it became something achieved, and you grew to see that every conversation was the better for being unhad, because silence was more exacting than speech and more truly communicative. That they had often spent hours and even days together without exchanging a word was the mark of their friendship, its signature or proof. So it seemed to Arthur, though it was possible that Louis saw things differently. They had never actually discussed it.

As they passed the stone steps that led down to the croquet lawn, Louis stopped walking, arrested by some stray thought. Arthur continued a little further along the path, then waited. He blew on his fingernails. At this distance Louis cut a bedraggled figure, dark-headed and untidily tall, one hand gathering the lapels of his old tweed overcoat. There was no use in impatience, because it had never occurred to Louis to hurry himself on another person’s account. All of his time was his own. Venn aside, he spent his days tramping around Battersea Park or hiding out in galleries, museums and pubs. When all else failed he’d go back to his digs and try to work, until the attempt brought him to such despair that he would trek out to the hospital, where Arthur would give him as long as he needed, saying no, of course it wasn’t inconvenient and he wasn’t too busy. In truth, though, he was always too busy. Arthur’s time belonged to others.

They walked on, into the woodland that skirted the estate. Friendship was a word whose meaning grew less clear the more he said it to himself, but he knew that it was worth keeping. It was the work of many years. The longer a silence lasts the harder it becomes to break, and they would not now be capable of these rare silences if they hadn’t shared the prehistory of schoolboy obsessions, student philosophising, angst of youth and all that. In his first term at Donard, he had been cornered in the library by two boys who snatched a letter he was writing to his mother and read it aloud in snivelling voices, until Louis appeared, levering himself up from an armchair and somehow, with a few casual and friendly-seeming words, causing the larger of the two boys to drop the letter on the table and hasten out of the library, snarling at his accomplice to keep up. Arthur couldn’t remember how he’d felt about being rescued, whether he was glad or ashamed or in fact anything, because that was the era before he had been shaped into a thinking being with a point of view from which to make sense of what happened to him. As a new boy he hadn’t so much minded a life regimented by early rising and cold baths, rules about where you could go when, morning chapel and cross-country runs. What had appalled him were the gaps in the timetable where you were left to fend for yourself. In the world that had swallowed him, he dimly understood, the trappings of the routine, with its hierarchies and rituals and organised violence, were only the visible signs of a deeper threat, which was invisible and nameless but which he had felt as it moved along the corridors and waited in the boot rooms. Even then he’d known the school wanted something from him that he was not prepared to give. Since those days he had thought of himself as hating institutional life and wanting only to be free, but then consider the evidence: after Donard, TCD, then more barrack life at Baggot Street, and now here he was, living and working in the Calvary and never going anywhere except to traipse up to Bloomsbury three times a week and pay his own tribute to Venn. And where was that supposed to lead?

Arthur still regularly lost his bearings when he walked around the hospital. The trees that grew throughout the grounds were disorienting, sometimes folding themselves aside to reveal one of the modern villas that housed most of the treatment rooms and offices, then a few paces later closing up so that nothing was visible but trunks rising from a mossy floor. Now, as they struck back towards the centre of the hospital, the greenery opened and two figures came towards them. A male nurse was escorting a male patient through the grounds. Louis stared frankly at the pair, but they passed by, keys clanking, as if they saw nothing. Some people could get on good easy terms with nurses with just a few words, a joke and a grin, which was an advantage, especially here, but Arthur had never had the knack.

The rims of his ears burned with the cold. A worse pain than his fingers. It was futile to be trailing around out here, putting on this pretence of companionable meditation when in truth he hated the cold waste of time and the pointless silence through which he always resigned himself to suffer until Louis decided it should end. He seemed to have no choice in this. It couldn’t be fair, could it, to be made responsible for someone else, but at some turning point long forgotten he’d allowed it to happen. Certainly the tone had been set before they left Donard. Take that night in their last year when Louis had smuggled in a half-bottle of whiskey, necked the lot and slipped out of the school after lights out. Arthur had been furious and ready to break with him for good, but he had followed, deadly scared of getting caught out of bounds, to trail Louis across the playing fields and persuade him back inside.

Another screen of foliage shifted and the red brick of Creedy House was above them. Quiet Female One and Convalescent. The electric lamp over the entrance was lit. Arthur saw Celia Prentice with her face upturned at midnight in the light of a street lamp, her lips apart, waiting, beginning to laugh. Thanks be to Christ Louis doesn’t know of that at least. But who could tell what Louis knew: perhaps he knew well that Arthur hated these silent walks, and perhaps he imposed them in a spirit of contempt, chuckling inwardly at Arthur putting up with it, Arthur squirming but not being honest enough to bring it to an end. Perhaps Louis was taking some form of revenge. But how much revenge did he need for all the miles of pavement Arthur had walked with him, and all the nights in dingy rooms spent sitting up until dawn? It was obvious by now that they would never reach the end of it. Whenever he thought he had discharged his duties they returned in a new guise, and he knew what the silence meant today. The book which Louis had been writing, in theory if not practice, ever since he had moved to London was in its customary state of crisis. The provisional title was Jott: beyond this cryptic syllable Louis had not revealed any of the details of what he was trying to write, though he would talk at length about the agonies involved in failing to write it. Arthur gathered that the book had been at death’s door for months. It seemed likely that when it finally expired Louis would throw in his London life and limp back to Dublin, and that this would do him no good at all.

They passed the other ward blocks and the chapel, then cut down an alley where the back wall of the kitchens vented steam and the smell of overcooked vegetables. The daylight was starting to go. If that was the meaning of the silence then it was Arthur’s fault, of course, for talking too much about his own work in the first weeks. But Louis had led him into it by asking every time they met, and seeming so interested that Arthur could hardly be blamed if he’d shown off a little about his new responsibilities. Louis had asked all manner of questions about the hospital: about how wards were organised and what therapies were practised, about the attitudes of nurses to patients and of doctors to nurses, about the difficulties of caring for those who could not be held responsible for their words or actions. He wanted to hear about the patients themselves, and above all about the long-term cases, the hopeless ones, of whom there weren’t many and whose presence was strictly against the rules, as the Calvary Royal Hospital was an institution for the curably insane. Why the chronic cases should have a special appeal for Louis Arthur did not want to ask, for fear of giving encouragement. If Arthur put Louis in a white coat and took him on a ward round then probably no one would give him a second glance, and really there could be no harm in it, but Arthur felt, without knowing quite why, that it must not happen.

Above all Louis wanted to meet Mr Walker, about whom he’d heard so much. He had only made the request once, on one of these walks in the hospital grounds: Arthur had mumbled something about it being an interesting idea and his having to see, and since then had been ever more conscious of Louis’s irreproachable silence on the matter. Perhaps it was true that in some mysterious way going on the wards would help Louis get on with his book, and no doubt Arthur would be able to square it with his conscience well enough, telling himself it was a kindness to a friend and that putting the patients at the service of a struggling writer, doing them no harm, was no real betrayal. But he would know that in truth it was simpler than this, and that yet again he had been the weak one who gives way because the other will is stronger.

They were coming back towards the main gate, where the administration block, the junior doctors’ accommodation and the reception ward faced one another across a courtyard. A purple tint had leaked into the air from among the branches of the trees, which were enormous, much taller than any of the hospital buildings: you could work here for weeks on end without registering them at all, and then at a moment like this you saw them for what they were, huge, ungraspable expressions of matter. And then, if you let them, they began to look like messengers, signifying perhaps that Arthur would never again be known in the way that Louis knew him, because no one he could hope to meet in his life from now on would get so deep a hold, because an association like this must begin before you are formed, because it’s what forms you, and that can only happen once. Louis had stolen Arthur’s chance to be other than what he was, now or ever; Louis had come here today for no other purpose than to torment him with silence until he surrendered; Louis was ruthless, and there was no escape. These were unreasonable thoughts but they were gaining now, so, close to giving himself away with some small noise or gesture, Arthur did the same thing he had done at this stage of every other visit that Louis had paid to the hospital, and challenged him to a game.

At Donard they had played all the time, Louis winning more often than not, though the outcome was unpredictable enough to make the game worthwhile. The oldest roots of their friendship were in shared enthusiasms of this kind. They had both been addicted to Conan Doyle, Wodehouse and M. R. James, and had amused one another by writing parodies and satires. They had gone through obsessions with piquet and whist and phases of inventing wordgames. Both being good at the books, they had become rival scholars: Louis was untouchable at languages ancient and modern, but Arthur sometimes edged him into second place in English and always beat him at the sciences. Arthur hated rugby, unlike Louis, who played fly half for the first fifteen, but both were decent cricketers and in the summer term of their fourth year they opened the batting. Their alliance had faced certain tests, too, as when they had decided they would refuse to join the Officer Training Corps, so that the deputy headmaster called them to his office and spoke with dangerous restraint about their duty to school and nation. While Louis observed that no rule compelled them to take part, Arthur stood tongue-tied and horrified that a bit of blustering talk after prep had led to this, so that the deputy head, spotting his target, leaned close, eyes bulging with the disfavour that would follow if Arthur did not betray his comrade, and invited him to change his mind. But somehow he held the line, and with a final snort the man dismissed them. As they escaped into the corridor they stifled laughter, Arthur not having known this kind of triumph was possible. They spent the Saturday afternoon lounging beside the tennis courts watching boys and masters march about, Arthur saying that patriotism was for asses, Louis adding that a nation was nothing more than a deceit practised on its people and both agreeing furthermore that religion was bosh and that society in its current form was rotten, though whereas Arthur took the view that science would eventually free humankind from all forms of unhappiness, Louis predicted that civilisation would stumble to a close before long and those left in the ashes would be better off. And one June Sunday they walked into the fields around the school, lay down under an oak tree and tried to learn ‘Julian and Maddalo’ by heart, Arthur soon forgetting all but a few lines of the poem but remembering the buzzing grasses and the glare of the sky.

Now Arthur pointed at Louis’s left fist, which opened to reveal a white pawn. They had the junior doctors’ common room to themselves. Ellis had been here, but as they came in he had swigged the last of his tea, shaken his newspaper shut and risen, nodding vaguely as he left. Now that they were alone they could draw a pair of low, threadbare armchairs up close to the electric fire, which was better than the one in Arthur’s room. Louis set up the board with quick, sure movements and swivelled it to present him with White.

The set was a small boxwood Staunton which Louis had given Arthur when he began the Calvary job, saying he had found it in a Brompton junk shop and that it would give him an excuse to visit the hospital. Junk shop or not, it must have cost more than Louis could easily afford. Arthur liked the pieces, with their lead weighting and green felt bases, but as usual he couldn’t think why he had let himself in for a game.

He slid the queen’s pawn forward two squares, feeling reasonably sure that this did not amount to a howler. Playing White was worse because his opening move had nothing to guide it except his own incompetence. Louis moved his own queen’s pawn out to meet White’s, and at once the array of possible mistakes became overwhelming. Arthur advanced another pawn, the queen’s bishop’s, to stand beside the first. He could still remember one or two openings to a depth of a few moves, and he liked this one because it felt asymmetrical and surprising, as if he had a plan. If he could avoid disaster for two or three turns he might put up a respectable show.

Louis pushed the steel-rimmed spectacles up on his forehead, considering White’s gambit. Arthur tried to concentrate. His second pawn was offering itself for capture, a lure to draw Black into a weaker position. Black could accept the gambit by taking the pawn, or decline it by moving up a second pawn to defend the first, but Louis did neither. He ignored the lure and brought out a knight to threaten White’s pawn instead. Immediately at sea, Arthur stared at the board for too long, willing inspiration, and finally pushed another pawn forward. It was a purposeless move, but Louis brought his face closer to the board and pursed his lips as if searching for hidden brilliance.

At school it had never occurred to Arthur that chess was a waste of time, because, like cricket, cards and chemistry, like everything they did in those days, it was not so much itself as a promise of what was to come. Far from being trivial, those games had been their guarantees of what the future owed; but now it was today, and so much more had happened, and the only reason to play was to get it over with. Black having declined White’s opening gambit, the pieces stayed where they were, blocking the middle of the board. All opening moves had been made, knights and bishops deployed and pawns locked into position, and Arthur could find nothing to do that would not expose him. Sooner or later in every game the pieces turned into dumb bits of wood, meaningless in relation to one another.

He had lost his taste for chess soon after going up to Trinity, where although they still played, most often in Louis’s rooms with the foliage of Botany Bay screening the window, they were no longer a good match. Arthur had stopped improving, and any feeling he’d had for the game was leaving him. He needed to concentrate on other things. Arthur was reading medicine, Louis modern languages, and the fact of having come here together had introduced an intrepid note to their friendship. The first term in Dublin was solid rain, with light barely breaking the clouds each day before evening closed in, but Arthur was dizzy with discovering that all of this was his: O’Connell Street’s decaying fronts, Stephen’s Green, the reeling gulls and the river stinking of the sea, the Georgian slums, dank tea shops and pubs and the unkind faces that swarmed in the streets. He was falling towards the future, and if he was too smitten with his freedom to do much with it, that didn’t seem to matter, because to be here was enough. It was enough that at chucking-out time he and Louis stumbled back to Front Arch, not feeling the cold though it had them shivering, to make it through before the porters locked up for the night. First thing in the morning Arthur hurried with shaking hands to the dissection room, then eight hours later called on Louis to find him still in bed but willing to rise for dinner in the chophouse on George Street, after which and a restorative in O’Neill’s they would see a play at the Abbey, sitting in their favourite seats on the balcony aisle.

Louis castled on the kingside, picking up the king and the rook in one hand and switching them around with a fluent gesture. There seemed to be an essential difference between those prompt black pieces and the white ones that sat on this side of the board, refusing to cooperate. At school Arthur and Louis had both liked the idea that it was in the nature of chess for the position to become, within a few moves, far too complex to understand, so that you had to play less against your opponent than against your own inadequacy to the task. It meant that the sensible approach was untroubled curiosity, watching the pattern unfold, learning from it and not minding the outcome, but Louis had always been better at that kind of detachment, and not only at the chessboard. When he wanted to he could take himself out of consideration, which accounted for his curious ability to go anywhere and speak to anyone. Once, walking through Rutland Square, Arthur had caught sight of Louis cross-legged on the pavement, deep in talk with the madman who sat there every day calling at passers-by. They looked as if they were thrashing out a serious matter, so Arthur kept his head down and continued along Frederick Street, unsure what he had learned about his friend. And the following spring Louis took him on a walk that lasted for most of a day, heading first into the rookeries of the north side, through foul alleys where Arthur saw foul sights – grown men squabbling like children, a small girl squatting naked, a doorway in which two maimed soldiers begged – and felt so conspicuous that putting one foot in front of the other became an unfamiliar operation, as in the dream where you trip yourself at every step.

Try telling mother and her friends about this, Louis had said as they walked along the canal towards the prison. Tell them about this down in Dalkey and they’ll clench their nostrils like you’ve farted a goodun. Arthur, impressed, wanted to agree: it was true, the misery of the world was not to be tolerated. They went out as far as the racecourse and walked back through the Phoenix Park while the sky sifted into rust-red, grey and old gold, getting back to college soon after dark, where, sitting up in Botany Bay, Louis talked until the small hours and Arthur slowly understood that he was hearing the story of a broken heart. There had been a young woman, a friend of the Molyneux family, known to Louis since they were small, whom he had loved for most of the time he had been at Donard. This was the first Arthur had heard of it. Louis had seen her in the summer vacations, but their mothers had found out about the attachment and separated them. Her name was Connie. He had not seen her alone for nearly three years, and not at all since coming up to Dublin, and now, yesterday, he had learned that she had died of tuberculosis, the news given as an aside in a letter from his mother. Arthur had not the faintest idea what to say. More confidences came out, quite casually, as Louis told the story: a liaison with a girl from the Modern Languages Society had come to an unpleasant end a fortnight ago; Louis had been paying night visits to Monto all the time he had been in the city. Arthur could think of nothing except to tell Louis that he should take a Wassermann test as soon as possible, and saying this he heard his own voice as that of a prim schoolboy, frightened and ignorant and trying to hide it. But why had Louis not let him in on that side of life: was it so plain that he had no business there? He had never had the chance, he’d barely spoken to a woman. No one could have been worse equipped . . .