The Citadel (22 page)

‘The MRCP!’ he echoed blankly. Then: ‘So she’s been thinking it out all by her little self. The MRCP – huh! – take
that
from a mining practice!’ His satire should have overwhelmed her. ‘Don’t you understand they only give that to the crowned heads of Europe!’

He banged the door and went into the bathroom to shave. Five minutes later he was back again, one half of his chin shaved, the other lathered. He was penitent, excited.

‘Do you
think
I could do it, Chris! You’re absolutely right. We need a few pips on the good old name plate so we can hold our end up! But the MRCP – it’s the most difficult medical exam, in the whole shoot. It’s – it’s
murder
! Still – I believe – wait and I’ll get the particulars –’

Breaking off, he dashed downstairs for the Medical Directory. When he returned with it his face had fallen to acute dejection.

‘Sunk!’ he muttered dismally. ‘Right bang off! I
told
you it was an impossible exam. There’s a preliminary paper in languages. Four languages. Latin, French, Greek, German – and two of them are compulsory, before you can even
sit
the cursed thing. I don’t know languages. All the Latin I know is dog lingo – mist, alba – mitte decem. As for French –’

She did not answer. There was a silence while he stood at the window gloomily considering the empty view. At last he turned frowning, worrying, unable to leave the bone alone.

‘Why shouldn’t I –
damn
it all, Chris – why shouldn’t I learn these languages
for
the exam.?’

Her manicure things spread themselves upon the floor as she jumped out of bed and hugged him.

‘Oh, I did want you to say that, my dear. That’s the real
you.
I could – I could help you perhaps. Don’t forget your old woman’s a retired schoolmarm!’

They made plans excitedly all day. They bundled Trollope, Tchekov and Dostoevsky into the spare bedroom. They cleared the sitting-room for action. All that evening he went to school with her. The next evening, and the next –

Sometimes Andrew felt the sublime bathos of it, heard from afar off the mocking laughter of the gods. Sitting over the hard table with his wife, in this remote Welsh mining town, muttering after her
caput – capitis
, or
Madame, est-il possible que?
, wading through declensions, irregular verbs, reading aloud from
Tacitus
, and a patriotic reader they had picked up,
Pro Patria
– he would jerk back suddenly in his chair, morbidly conscious –

‘If Llewellyn could see us here – wouldn’t he grin! And to think this is only the beginning, that I’ve got all the medical stuff after!’

Towards the end of the following month parcels of books began to arrive periodically at Vale View from the London branch of the International Medical Library. Andrew began to read where, at college, he had left off. He discovered, quickly, how early he had left off. He discovered and was swamped by the therapeutic advance of biochemistry. He discovered renal thresholds, blood ureas, basal metabolism, and the fallibility of the albumen test. As this keystone of his student’s days fell from him he groaned aloud.

‘Chris! I know nothing. And this stuff is killing me!’

He had to contend with the work of his practice, he had only the long nights in which to study. Sustained by black coffee and a wet towel round his head he battled on, reading into the early hours of the morning. When he fell into bed, exhausted, often he could not sleep. And sometimes when he slept he would awake, sweating from a nightmare, his head ablaze with terms, formulae, and some drivelling imbecility of his halting French.

He smoked to excess, lost weight, became thinner in the face. But Chris was there, constantly, silently, there, permitting him to talk, to draw diagrams, to explain, in tongue-twisting nomenclature, the extraordinary, the astounding, the fascinating selective action of the kidney tubules. She also permitted him to shout, gesticulate, and, as his nerves grew more ragged, to hurl abuse at her. At eleven o’clock as she brought him fresh coffee he became liable to snarl:

‘Why can’t you leave me alone? What’s this slush for anyway? Caffeine – it’s only a rotten drug. You know I’m killing myself, don’t you. And it’s all for you. You’re hard! You’re damnably hard. You’re like a female turnkey, marching in and out with skilly! I’ll never get this blasted thing. There are hundreds of fellows trying to get it from the West End of London, from the big hospitals, and me! – from Aberalaw – ha, ha!’ His laughter was hysterical. ‘From the dear old Medical Aid Society! Oh, God! I’m so tired and I know they’ll have me out tonight for that confinement in Cefan Row and –’

She was a better soldier than he. She had a quality of balance which steadied them through every crisis. She also had a temper but she controlled it. She made sacrifices, refused all invitations from the Vaughans, stopped going to the orchestral concerts in the Temperance Hall. No matter how badly she had slept she was always up early, neatly dressed, ready with his breakfast when he came dragging down, unshaven, the first cigarette of the day already between his lips.

Suddenly, when he had been working six months, her aunt in Bridlington took ill with phlebitis and wrote asking her to come North. Handing him the letter she declared immediately that it was impossible for her to leave him. But he, bunched sulkily over his bacon and egg, growled out:

‘I wish you’d go, Chris! Studying this way, I’d get on better without you. We’ve been getting on each other’s nerves lately. Sorry – but – it seems the best thing to do.’

She went, unwillingly, at the end of the week. Before she had been gone twenty-four hours he found out his mistake. It was agony without her. Jenny, though working to carefully prepared instructions, was a perpetual aggravation. But it was not Jenny’s cooking, or the lukewarm coffee, or the badly made bed. It was Christine’s absence: knowing she was not in the house, being unable to call out to her, missing her. He found himself gazing dully at his books, losing hours, while he thought of her.

At the end of a fortnight she wired that she was returning. He dropped everything and prepared to receive her. Nothing was too good, too spectacular for the celebration of their reunion. Her wire had not given him much time but he thought rapidly, then sped to the town on a mission of extravagance. He bought first a bunch of roses. In Kendrick’s the fishmonger’s he was lucky to find a lobster, fresh in that morning. He seized it quickly, lest Mrs Vaughan – for whom Kendrick primarily intended all such delicacies – should ring up and forestall him. Then he bought ice in quantity, called at the greengrocer’s for salad and finally, with trepidation, ordered one bottle of moselle which Lampert, the grocer in the Square, assured him was ‘ sound’.

After tea he told Jenny she might go, for already he could feel her youthful eye fastened inquisitively upon him. He then set to work and lovingly composed a lobster salad. The zinc bucket from the scullery, filled with ice, made an excellent wine pail. The flowers presented an unexpected difficulty, for Jenny had locked up the cupboard under the stairs where all the vases were kept and, to all intents, hidden the key. But he surmounted even this obstruction, placing half the roses in the water jug and the remainder in the tooth-brush holder from the toilet set upstairs. It struck quite a note of variety.

At last his preparations were complete – the flowers, the food, the wine upon the ice, his eye surveyed the scene with shining intensity. After surgery, at half past nine, he raced to meet her train at the Upper Station.

It was like falling in love all over again, fresh, wonderful. Tenderly, he escorted her to the love feast. The evening was hot and still. The moon shone in upon him. He forgot about the intricacies of basal metabolism. He told her they might be in Provence, or some place like that, in a great castle by a lake. He told her she was a sweet, exquisite child. He told her he had been a brute to her but that for the rest of his life he would be a carpet – not red, since she interjected her objection to that colour – on which she might tread. He told her much more than that. By the end of the week he was telling her to fetch his slippers.

August arrived, dusty and scorching. With the finish of his reading in sight he was confronted with the necessity of brushing up his practical work, particularly histology – an apparently insuperable difficulty in his present situation. It was Christine who thought of Professor Challis and his position at Cardiff University. When Andrew wrote to him, Challis immediately replied stating, with verbosity, that he would rejoice to use his influence with the Department of Pathology. Manson, he said, would find Doctor Glyn-Jones a first rate fellow. He concluded with a carolling inquiry for Christine.

‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Chris! It does mean something to have friends. And I very nearly stuck away from meeting Challis that night at Vaughans’. Decent old bouncer! But all the same, I hate asking favours. And what’s this about sending tender regards to you!’

In the middle of that month a second-hand Red Indian motor cycle – a low, wickedly unprofessional machine, advertised as ‘ too fast’ for its previous owner – made its appearance at Vale View. There were, in the slackness of summer, three afternoon hours which Andrew might reasonably regard as his own. Every day, immediately after lunch, a red streak went roaring down the valley in the direction of Cardiff, thirty miles away. And every day towards five o’clock a slightly dustier red streak, moving in the opposite direction, made a target of Vale View.

These sixty miles in the broiling heat with an hour’s work at Glyn-Jones’s specimens and slides, sandwiched midway, often using the microscope with hands which still shook from the handlebars’ vibration, made heavy going of the next few weeks. For Christine it was the most anxious part of the whole lunatic adventure, to see him depart with a swift crackling exhaust, to wait anxiously for the first faint beat of his return, fearing all the time that something must happen to him bent to the metal of that satanic machine.

Though he was so rushed he found a moment occasionally to bring her strawberries from Cardiff. They saved these till after his surgery. At tea he was always parched from the dust and red-eyed, wondering gloomily if his duodenum had not dropped off at that last pothole in Trecoed, asking himself if he could possibly manage before the surgery these two calls which had come in during his absence.

But the final journey was made at last. Glyn-Jones had nothing more to show him. He knew every slide and every single specimen by heart. All that remained was to enter his name and send up the heavy entrance fees for the examination.

On the 15th of October Andrew set out alone for London. Christine saw him to the station. Now that the actual event was so close at hand a queer calmness had settled upon him. All his striving, his frenzied efforts, his almost hysterical outbursts, seemed far away and done with. His brain was inactive, almost dull. He felt that he knew nothing.

Yet, on the following day, when he began the written part of the examination which was held at the College of Physicians, he found himself answering the papers with a blind automatism. He wrote and wrote, never looking at the clock, filling sheet after sheet, until his head reeled.

He had taken a room at the Museum Hotel where Christine and he had stayed on their first visit to London. Here it was extremely cheap. But the food was vile, adding the final touch to his upset digestion required to produce a bad attack of dyspepsia. He was compelled to restrict his diet to hot malted milk. A tumblerful in an ABC tea-room in the Strand was his lunch. Between his papers he lived in a kind of daze. He did not dream of going to a place of amusement. He scarcely saw the people in the streets. Occasionally, to clear his head he took a ride on the top of an omnibus.

After the written papers the practical and viva voce part of the examinations began and Andrew found himself dreading this more than anything which had gone before. There were perhaps twenty other candidates, all of them men older than himself, and all with an unmistakable air of assurance and position. The candidate placed next to him, for instance, a man named Harrison whom he had once or twice spoken to, had an Oxford BCh, an out-patient appointment at St John’s and a consulting-room in Brook Street. When Andrew compared Harrison’s charming manners and obvious standing with his own provincial awkwardness he felt his chances of favourably impressing the examiners to be small indeed.

His practical, at the South London Hospital, went, he thought, well enough. His case was one of bronchiectasis in a young boy of fourteen, which, since he knew lungs so intimately, was a piece of good fortune. He felt he had written a good report. But when it came to the viva voce his luck seemed to change completely. The viva procedure at the College of Physicians had its peculiarities. On two successive days each candidate was questioned, in turn, by two separate examiners. If at the end of the first session the candidate was found inadequate he was handed a polite note telling him he need not return on the following day. Faced with the imminence of this fatal missive Andrew found to his horror that he had drawn as his first examiner a man he had heard Harrison speak of with apprehension, Doctor Maurice Gadsby.

Gadsby was a spare undersized man with a ragged black moustache and small, mean eyes. Recently elected to his Fellowship, he had none of the tolerance of the older examiners, but seemed to set out deliberately to fail the candidates who came before him. He considered Andrew with a supercilious lift to his brows and placed before him six slides. Five of these slides Andrew named correctly but the sixth he could not name. It was on this slide that Gadsby concentrated. For five minutes he harassed Andrew on this section – which it appeared, was the ovum of an obscure West African parasite – then idly, without interest, he passed him on to the next examiner, Sir Robert Abbey.

Andrew rose and crossed the room with a pale face and a heavily beating heart. All the lassitude, the inertia he had experienced at the beginning of the week was gone now. He had an almost desperate desire to succeed. But he was convinced that Gadsby would fail him. He raised his eyes to find Robert Abbey contemplating him with a friendly, half humorous smile.