The Citadel (49 page)

‘This must be your last visit. You’ve been coming a long time. You’re quite better now. And it doesn’t do to go on drinking medicine!’

It was amazing, at the end of it, how much lighter he felt. To be able to speak his mind honestly and emphatically was a luxury he had long denied himself. He went in to Christine with a step almost boyish.

‘Now I feel less like a salesman for bath salts!’ He groaned: ‘God! How can I talk that way. I’m forgetting what’s happened – Vidler – everything I’ve done!’

It was then that the telephone rang. She went to answer it, and it seemed to him that she was a longish time absent and that when she returned her expression was again oddly strained.

‘Someone wants you on the phone.’

‘Who …?’ All at once he realised that Frances Lawrence had called him up. There was a bar of silence in the room. Then, hurriedly, he said, ‘Tell her I’m not in. Tell her I’ve gone away. No, wait!’ His expression strengthened, he took an abrupt movement forward. ‘I’ll speak to her myself.’

He came back in five minutes to find that she had seated herself with some work in her familiar corner where the light was good. He glanced at her covertly then glanced away, walked to the window and stood there moodily looking out with his hands in his pockets. The quiet click of her knitting needles made him feel inordinately foolish, a sad and stupid dog, cringing home limp tailed and bedraggled from some illicit foray. At last he could contain himself no longer. Still with his back to her he said:

‘That’s finished too. It may interest you to know it was only my stupid vanity – that and self interest. I loved you all the time.’ Suddenly he ground out, ‘Damn it, Chris. It was all my fault. These people don’t know any different, but I do. I’m getting out of this too easy – too easy. But let me tell you – while I was at the phone I rang up le Roy, thought I might as well make one job of it. Cremo products won’t be interested in me any more. I’ve wiped myself off their slate, too, Chris. And, God! I’ll see that I stay off!’

She did not answer but the click of her needles made, in the silent room, a brisk and cheerful sound. He must have remained there a long time, his shamed eyes upon the movement of the street outside, upon the lights springing up through the summer darkness. When at length he turned the invading dusk had crept into the room but she still sat there, almost invisible in the shadowed chair, a small slight figure occupied with her knitting.

That night he woke up sweating and distressed, turning to her blindly, still anguished by the terrors of his dream.

‘Where are you, Chris? I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. I’ll do my best to be decent to you in future.’ Then quieted, already half asleep. ‘We’ll take a holiday when we sell out here. God! My nerves are rotten – to think I once called you neurotic! And when we settle down, wherever it is, you’ll have a garden, Chris. I know how you love it. Remember – remember at Vale View, Chris?’

Next morning he brought her home a great bunch of chrysanthemums. He strove with all his old intensity, to show his affection for her, not by that showy generosity which she had hated – the thought of that Plaza luncheon still made him shiver! – but in small considerate, almost forgotten, ways.

At tea time when he came home with a special kind of sponge cake that she liked and on top of that silently brought in her house slippers from the cupboard at the end of the passage she sat up in her chair, frowning, mildly protesting:

‘Don’t, darling,
don’t
– or I’m sure to suffer for it. Next week you’ll be tearing your hair and kicking me round the house – like you used to in those old days.’

‘Chris!’ he exclaimed, his face shocked, pained. ‘ Can’t you see that’s all changed. From now on I’m going to make things up to you.’

‘All right, all right, my dear.’ Smiling she wiped her eyes. Then with a sudden tensity of which he had never suspected her, ‘I don’t mind how it is so long as we’re
together.
I don’t want you to run after me. All I ask is that you don’t run after anybody else.’

That evening Denny arrived, as he had promised, for supper. He brought a message from Hope, who had rung him on the toll line from Cambridge, to say that he would be unable to get to London that evening.

‘He said he was detained on business,’ Denny declared, knocking out his pipe. ‘But I strongly suspect friend Hope will shortly be taking unto himself a bride. Romantic business – the mating of a bacteriologist!’

‘Did he say anything about my idea?’ Andrew asked quickly.

‘Yes, he’s keen – not that it matters, we could just pocket him and take him along with us! And I’m keen too.’ Denny unfurled his napkin and helped himself to salad. ‘I can’t imagine how a first class scheme like this came out of your fool head. Especially when I fancied you’d tucked yourself up as a West End soap merchant. Tell me about it.’

Andrew told him, fully, and with increasing emphasis. They began to discuss the scheme in its more practical details. They suddenly realised how far they had progressed when Denny said:

‘My view is that we don’t want to pick too large a town. Under twenty thousand inhabitants – that’s ideal. We can make things hum there. Look at a map of the West Midlands. You’ll find scores of industrial towns served by four or five doctors who are politely at each other’s throats, where the good old MD drags out half a tonsil one morning and sludges mist. alba the next. It’s just there that we can demonstrate our idea of specialised co-operation. We won’t buy ourselves in. We just, so to speak, arrive. Lord! I’d like to see their faces, Doctor Brown and Jones and Robinson, I mean. We’ll have to stand waggon loads of abuse – incidentally, we may be lynched. Seriously, though, we want a central clinic – as you say – with Hope’s lab. attached. We might even have a couple of beds upstairs. We won’t be very grand at first – it means conversion rather than building, I suppose – but I’ve a feeling we’ll take root.’ Suddenly aware of Christine’s glistening eyes as she sat following their talk he smiled. ‘What do you think about it, ma’am? Crazy, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she answered a trifle huskily. ‘ But it’s – it’s the crazy things that matter.’

‘That’s the word, Chris! By God! This does matter.’

Andrew bounced the cutlery as he brought down his fist. ‘The scheme’s good. But it’s the ideal behind the scheme! A new interpretation of the Hippocratic oath; an absolute allegiance to the scientific ideal, no empiricism, no shoddy methods, no stock prescribing, no fee-snatching, no proprietary muck, no soft-soaping of hypochondriacs, no – Oh! for the Lord’s sake, give me a drink! My vocal cords won’t stand up to this, I ought to have a drum.’

They talked on until one o’clock in the morning. Andrew’s tense excitement was a stimulus felt even by the stoic Denny. His last train had long since departed. That night he occupied the spare room and as he hurried off after breakfast on the following day he promised to come to town again on the following Friday. Meanwhile he would see Hope and – final proof of his enthusiasm – buy a large scale map of the West Midlands.

‘It’s on, Chris, it’s on!’ Andrew came back triumphant from the door. ‘Philip’s as keen as mustard. He doesn’t say much. But
I know.
’

That same day they had the first inquiry for the practice. A prospective buyer arrived and he was followed by others. Gerald Turner came in person with the more likely purchasers. He had a beautiful flow of elegant language which he even directed upon the architecture of the garage. On Monday, Doctor Noel Lowry called twice, alone in the morning and escorted by the agent in the afternoon. Thereafter Turner rang up Andrew, suavely confidential:

‘Doctor Lowry is interested, doctor,
very
interested I may say. He’s particularly anxious we don’t sell till his wife has a chance to see the house. She’s at the seaside with the children. She’s coming up Wednesday.’

This was the day on which Andrew had arranged to take Mary to Bellevue but he felt the matter could be left in Turner’s hands. Everything had gone as he anticipated at the hospital. Mary was due to leave at two o’clock. He had fixed up with Nurse Sharp to accompany them in the car.

It was raining heavily as, at half past one, he started off by driving to Welbeck Street to pick up Nurse Sharp. She was in a sulky humour, waiting but unwilling, when he reached no 57a. Since he had told her he must dispense with her service at the end of the month her moods had been even more uncertain. She snapped an answer to his greeting and stepped into the car.

Fortunately he had no difficulty with Mary. He drew up as she came through the porter’s lodge and the next moment she was in the back of the saloon with Nurse Sharp, warmly wrapped in a rug with a hot bottle at her feet. They had not gone far, however, before he began to wish he had not brought the sulky and suspicious nurse. It was evident that she considered the expedition far beyond the scope of her duties. He wondered how he had managed to put up with her so long. At half past three they reached Bellevue. The rain had now ceased and a burst of sun came through the clouds as they ran up the drive. Mary leaned forward, her eyes fastened nervously, a little apprehensively, upon the place from which she had been led to expect so much.

Andrew found Stillman in the office. He was anxious to see the case with him at once for the question of pneumothorax induction weighed heavily on his mind. He spoke of this as he smoked a cigarette and drank a cup of tea.

‘Very well,’ Stillman nodded as he concluded. ‘We’ll go up right now.’

He led the way to Mary’s room. She was now in bed, pale from her journey and still inclined to apprehensiveness, gazing at Nurse Sharp who stood at one end of the room folding up her dress. She gave a little start as Stillman came forward.

He examined her meticulously. His examination was an illumination to Andrew, quiet, silent, absolutely precise. He had no bedside manner. He was not impressive. He did not, indeed, resemble a physician at work. He was like a business man engaged with the complications of an adding machine which had gone wrong. Although he used the stethoscope, most of his investigation was tactile, a palpation of the inter-rib and supra-clavicular spaces as if, through his smooth fingers, he could actually sense the condition of the living, breathing lung cells beneath.

When it was over he said nothing to Mary but took Andrew beyond the door.

‘Pneumothorax,’ he said. ‘There’s no question. That lung should have been collapsed weeks ago. I’m going to do it right away. Go back and tell her.’

While he went off to see to the apparatus Andrew returned to the room and informed Mary of their decision. He spoke as lightly as he could yet it was evident that the immediate prospect of the induction upset her further.

‘You’ll do it?’ she asked in an uneasy tone. ‘Oh! I’d much rather you did it.’

‘It’s nothing, Mary. You won’t feel the slightest pain. I’ll be here. I’ll be helping him! I’ll see that you’re all right.’

He had meant actually to leave the whole technique to Stillman. But as she was so nervous, so palpably depending upon him and as, indeed, he felt himself responsible for her presence here, he went to the treatment-room and offered his assistance to Stillman.

Ten minutes later they were ready. When Mary was brought in he gave her local anaesthesia. He then stood by the manometer, while Stillman skilfully inserted the needle, controlling the flow of sterile nitrogen gas into the pleura. The apparatus was exquisitely delicate and Stillman undoubtedly a master of the technique. He had an expert touch with the cannula, driving it deftly forward, his eye fixed upon the manometer for the final ‘snap’ which announced perforation of the parietal pleura. He had his own method of deep manipulation to prevent the occurrence of surgical emphysema.

After an early phase of acute nervousness Mary’s anxiety gradually faded. She submitted to the operation with increasing confidence and at the end she could smile at Andrew, completely relaxed. Back again in her room she said:

‘You were right. It was nothing. I don’t feel as if you’d done anything at all.’

‘No?’ He lifted an eyebrow; then laughed. ‘That’s how it should be – no fuss, no sense of anything terrible happening to you – I wish every operation could go that way! But we’ve immobilised that lung of yours all the same. It’ll have a rest now. And when it starts breathing again – believe me! – it will be healed.’

Her glance rested upon him then wandered round the pleasant room, through the window to the view of the valley beyond.

‘I’m going to like it here, after all. He doesn’t try to be nice – Mr Stillman, I mean – but somehow you feel he is nice. Do you think I could have my tea?’

It was nearly seven o’clock when he left Bellevue. He had remained longer than he had anticipated, talking to Stillman on the lower verandah, enjoying the cool air and the quiet conversation of the other man. As he drove off he was pervaded by an extraordinary sense of placidity, of tranquillity. He derived that benefit from Stillman whose personality, with its repose, it’s indifference to the trivialities of life, reacted favourably upon his own impetuous disposition. Moreover, he was now easy in his mind about Mary. He contrasted his previous hurried action, her summary dispatch into an out-of-date hospital, with all that he had done for her this afternoon. It had caused him inconvenience, a great deal of troublesome arrangement. It was quite unorthodox. Though he had not discussed the question of payment with Stillman, he realised that Con was in no position to meet the Bellevue fees and that, in consequence, the settlement of the bill would fall upon himself. But all this became as nothing beside the glowing sense of real achievement which pervaded him. For the first time in many months he felt that he had done something which, to his own belief, was worthy. It pervaded him warmly, a cherished thought, the beginning of his vindication.

He drove slowly, enjoying the quiet of the evening. Nurse Sharp once again sat in the back seat of the car but she had nothing to say and he, with his own thoughts, was almost unconscious of her. When they drew into London, however, he asked where he should drop her and, on her reply, drew up at Notting Hill Tube Station. He was glad to be rid of her. She was a good nurse but her nature was repressed and unhappy. She had never liked him. He decided to post her month’s salary to her the next day. Then he would not see her again.