The Good Doctor (8 page)

— Chapter Nine —

Florence dreads the morning like
none before. Through the long, dark hours she listens to the distant clopping of hooves, the occasional light shower pattering on the windowpane, and, later, the soft breezes rustling the trees in the mews. A hundred plans hatch one after the other, but feebly, like chicks born before their time, messy, confused, too delicate to stand.

One idea recurs more often than the others. She imagines herself hiding outside the clinic, waiting to intercept the young doctor as he arrives. She could then give him early warning that Willy is in possession of his note. At least this would be some kind of action.

But each time her brain spins through the details, the difficulties multiply. The young doctor is almost always the last to arrive. Willy will likely have been with Dr. Bleaker long enough by then to have passed the note and explained its significance. The small, plain courtyard outside the clinic entrance provides no hiding place of any kind, not even a tree, yet is too enclosed to afford a view from beyond its environs. Ambush would be impossible. And even if she could warn the young doctor, what difference would it make? Willy still has the note. He could still pass it to Dr. Bleaker any time he wishes and end the young man's career.

Other options twitch through her imagination. She might try to find out where the doctor lives and meet him as he sets out.
But again, Willy still has the note. She thinks of appealing one more time to him. She even dares to hope he has had a change of mind; she wanders turn by turn down the winding lane he would have to follow to arrive at the conclusion he should be merciful. It just isn't in him, she decides. Solidity is his virtue. Solidity means no change.

A thrill of love went through her when he challenged the sailor in the clinic on Saturday last. But it wasn't the strength of the action that moved her so much as his courage and vulnerability, the growing fluster in his voice and the way his face turned pink when the older man sidestepped his arguments so effortlessly. She loved him because he lost. The trouble with courage and determination is that ultimately they turn defeat into victory. Without the fluster, without the blushing face, Willy will lose all his allure. He will be just another doctor anchored in certainty, too aware of his own worth. She loved the boy but will not love the man.

Her eyes are too tired to notice the dawn as it floods around her. Dimly, she blinks once, twice, aware at last that black became milky yellow some time ago. She feels humbled suddenly by the fact that a night of a thousand tortured thoughts has yielded nothing of value. One mistake looms larger than ever. She let Willy take the note. This was an error she can never reverse.

***

Florence arrives at the clinic early, her movements brisk and nervy as she stows her bag and dresses for work. It's a vain hope, but she tells herself that being on the spot might somehow provide vital thinking time and thus a solution hitherto overlooked. Willy trots in soon after, his back straighter and more proud than usual, his walk odd and angular. She guesses he's angry, or frightened, or perhaps both. A certain haughtiness when he first addresses her—“Good morning, Nurse,” no eye contact—reinforces the impression. But the familiar dance of work, the bandages, syringes, disinfectant are soothing, like the rhythm of a journey that seems to ward off any thought of destination. When he raises the stethoscope to a patient's chest, Florence catches a definite wince and a tremor of the hand. Whether by learned instinct or pure accident, she takes a closer look and glimpses the yellowy-red discoloration of deep bruising on the inside of his right wrist. Right away she knows. He's been in a fight.

The young doctor clatters in.

“Late again, young sir,” says Dr. Bleaker.

“Sorry, Doctor,” comes the husky reply. Florence feels the young doctor's gaze on her. She steps a few inches from Willy, whose eyes begin to blink rapidly.

“Help me with these, then,” says Dr. Bleaker.

“Yes, Doctor.”

Willy dismisses the patient—a very pale, frightened woman in her fifties with anemia and probably worse—and turns slowly, stethoscope now around his neck. “Dr. Bleaker, may I have a quick word in private?”

“Is it urgent?”

“Yes, Doctor, it is.”

Dr. Bleaker scrapes his stool back and wipes his hands. His eyes peek out curiously over his spectacles. The young doctor stands by his side, a test tube in each hand, his shoulders sloping. Florence's heart pounds. The lulling journey is over; she can hear the screeching of the rails.

“Well then, Grenfell, follow me to the office. Wait until I return, Nurse, before you call the next patient.”

Dr. Bleaker strides toward the alcove that hides his tiny and mysterious office space. Willy follows, wiping his hands on his lab coat and clearing his throat. The door closes behind them. The surgery becomes unnaturally silent. The young doctor and Florence stare at each other. Above his lab coat collar, red marks stand out against the pale, shaven skin. His hand rises to his neck as though to cover the blemishes. The action gives her an opportunity. She shakes her head and steps forward.

“You know what's happening, don't you?” she whispers.

His eyes widen in some surprise—she realizes this is the friendliest she's ever been to him. Then he takes in the significance of the warning. His gaze shoots to the door.

“He knows about the forged note,” she says. Her face burns with a shame she knows to be unjustified. “He has it. I'm sorry.” His eyes, still fixed to the door, become glassy. “I couldn't stop him.”

“I'll be dismissed,” he whispers. “I'm finished.”

“No,” she says with warmth that takes her unawares. She has no idea why she sounds so optimistic, so defiant. “We'll think of something.”

He stares at her, fresh astonishment on his face. She feels as though a chink in a great impenetrable rock has opened up to her, providing a view of a whole other world of which she has been given no prior knowledge. He expected nothing, this man who followed her like a hunter stalking a deer, this creature who wove elaborate forgeries through the night. He anticipated no empathy and no success, and when the object of his attentions gives him even the hint of understanding, he is amazed. What a curious feature in a man to expect so little! What a contrast to Willy, who so effortlessly presumes that respect, affection, and even obedience are his due.

Soft murmurs come from beyond the office door, and she knows they have very little time to form a plan.

“What happened last night?” she asks. “Did you fight?” If so, a new reasoning begins to form: if they fought, any words against him might come under the pall of suspicion. A man of honour cannot defame a colleague with whom he has already fought on a matter unrelated. She knows this much about the code between gentlemen.

“He followed me. We struggled.” His hand moves toward his lab coat pocket. There is a crinkling sound and he retrieves a crumpled note. “He was making notes at the revival meeting. I was going to show you. I wanted to persuade you he was fickle. But it's too late now.”

Her fingers take the note before he has a chance to pass it to her. She will later wonder why men are considered creatures of action, when in reality it is women who perform in a crisis. The rougher sex merely freezes in terror. Her eyes scan the neat handwriting and prissy, overconfident underlining she recognizes as Willy's. Under the heading “
Memoranda
—
Moody's Method
—
Aspects to Reuse
”
is a baffling series of instructions. She reads it once and then a second time, trying to get some sense from it. The tone seems almost sacrilegious in its desire to mimic a new religious movement, and there is coldness at the heart of its ambition, too. She sensed this chill once before but had buried it quickly. He had been anxious to keep him as she believed him to be: honest, upright, and fearless.

Only on a second reading do the final lines, more lost in creases than the others, really catch her attention:
“Find a devoted and compliant wife like the poor creature sitting so patiently next to Moody (not English
—
English women far too assertive e.g. Nurse Mills).”

“He wrote this,” she says, more statement than question.

“Yes,” replies the young doctor, a dithering, distracted presence now.

The office door opens suddenly. Red-faced, but smug, Willy emerges, alone. He pulls at the collar of his lab coat as Florence has seen proud men tug at their suit lapels. He strides toward the workbench and picks up a cloth and polishes a glass beaker—a confusing action as Willy has been seeing patients this morning and the young doctor has been sorting through prescriptions and formulas.

Before there is time to consider the implications, Dr. Bleaker's face, like a frightened owl's, appears around his office door. “Nurse, Doctor, could you two come here for a moment, please?” Florence returns Willy's note to the young doctor and feels an ache as he folds it away in his lab pocket. They exchange a brief look of despair.

— Chapter Ten —

One day, Florence will muse
that decisions, particularly momentous ones, are made far more passively than most of us are prepared to admit. One road is eliminated, not by meticulously weighed logic that lends preference to another option, but rather by one's sheer inability to move along it. It's the stomach, not the mind, or even the heart, that decides. So it is for her that morning in late September in the London clinic with Dr. Bleaker. All roads are blocked, save one. She takes the road available to her.

“What have you to say for yourself?” Dr. Bleaker asks the young doctor. The supervising physician skews himself sideways at his small desk. He looks up uncomfortably, his eyes blinking behind his glasses. Florence feels sorry for him; she guesses he's in as much torment as the young doctor. Dr. Bleaker is a man who likes the ready cover of urgent work and sarcasm. The sudden need for direct communication has him in a featureless desert, no dispensing jars into which he can peer, no acid quips under which he can dart.

Florence looks again at the note which trembles slightly in Dr. Bleaker's hand.
“Florence, meet me tonight without fail outside Dr. Johnson's house, seven o'clock. Willy. X”
She marvels for the first time at how well the young doctor forged Willy's hand. She would never have been able to tell the difference between this and Willy's note from the revival meeting.

The young doctor's lips are white, his whole form trembling like a sapling in the wind. He's clearly struggling to say anything at all.

“Nurse Mills,” Dr. Bleaker says, “you may return to the clinic and prepare the next patient.”

The permission to leave is long past due, she thinks. Anyone with a sense of etiquette would never have asked the object of so much unseemly desire to be present even for a moment. Dr. Bleaker's office is so tiny, the three of them are inches from touching. The discomfort must have showed on her face and made him realize his blunder. Doctors, she has come to learn, lack social graces. And Dr. Bleaker is in a panic, a panic, she senses, that could well be an opportunity.

“Thank you, Doctor, but as Dr. Grenfell's note is addressed to me, I'd rather not leave it in another's possession. I will return it to Dr. Grenfell and he may destroy it if he wishes.”

Dr. Bleaker looks down at the paper, confused. “I'm sorry, Nurse Mills, but this is a forgery.” His small eyes blink from the other side of the lenses.

“No, Doctor. It's Dr. Grenfell's hand. You must recognize it.”

Again, he gives a bewildered look at the note.

What was it Nurse Armstrong said? One abrasion at a time. “I did not meet him, you see, and he has taken it all very hard. You cannot believe what he has told you about it.”

“I don't understand.” Dr. Bleaker's voice rises in pitch. “Grenfell's complaint is about you, Doctor.” He points at her companion and almost yells. But the tone is embarrassment, not anger. It's a
physician's
fear—fear of being wrong. She's seen it before in the medical profession: all those years of diagnosing; a career of prescriptions piling up on his shoulders. If he could misjudge human relationships so fundamentally, if he could fail to know who was telling the truth and who was deluded, what else might he have misjudged? This is the essential drawback of power, she thinks. Doctors never made
minor
mistakes. “He said you copied his hand in order to entrap Nurse Mills.” His face colours with indignation, but his shoulders slope in defeat.

I've got him, she thinks. But then the young doctor makes a sound—part squeak, part sigh—and she knows she has to press on quickly before he ruins her work. She gropes sideways, catches his moist hand, and gives it a warning squeeze.

“Since our engagement,” she tells Dr. Bleaker, keeping hold of her companion's hand, and glancing with affection at his stunned face. “I'm sorry, dear, I have to tell Dr. Bleaker.” Turning back to the supervising physician, she says, “We weren't going to announce it, you see, until we'd had consent from everyone. Anyway, it was our intention, and I believe Dr. Grenfell must have overheard us. He has been following us, you see.”

“
Grenfell
has been following
you
?”

“Perhaps it's overwork, or some of the things we have to deal with here in the clinic. He's a long way from home, isn't he?”

“The northwest,” Dr. Bleaker confirms in a gasp. “Cheshire, I think.”

“London can be overwhelming to newcomers.”

Dr. Bleaker's mouth hangs open, and he looks from Florence to the young doctor whose hand has become heavy in hers. She fears he has expired from sheer astonishment, life departing so swiftly his legs have not yet had time to buckle and deposit him on the floor. Dr. Bleaker stares one more time at the note in his hand. Shaking his head, he passes the paper to Florence. “It's beyond comprehension,” he says. She sees in his eyes an awaking to a new world of possibilities regarding the human mind, its blind spots and subterfuges. “You had better go back,” he sighs, leaning on his desk and stroking the sides of his mouth. “I'll be out in a few moments.” He catches a hesitation as he looks up. “Say nothing to him. I'll deal with the matter myself.”

The rest of the morning and the afternoon pass in a strange, almost silent, dance. While Florence avoids the hostile, frustrated glances thrown at her by Willy, relegated to the workbench, and notices his puzzled glances toward Dr. Bleaker, who is buried deeper in his prescriptions than usual, she keeps trying, and failing, to secure the returning gaze of the young doctor she has saved. He's even more distracted, nervy, and furtive than usual. When he wants Florence to hold the end of a bandage, his voice—which until this day has infused such commonplace phrases as “Hold this, Nurse,” with such weight and significance she used to believe he must have taken it from the last line of a Shakespeare sonnet—now deserts him completely. He just gives a twitchy gesture toward the fabric while avoiding her eye.

As the day rolls on, he becomes increasingly timid and more aware of the clock. It's as though the hour of six possesses some kind of reckoning from which he needs urgent escape. For Florence this jumpiness has an effect she could not have predicted. His fear sparks her anger, anger that a man should have declared all the constituent parts of romantic love—the ardour, the plea for mercy, the jealousy—only to disown the emotion once it has yielded the desired response.

She's so caught up in resentment she can barely tell if her impatience is caused by a theoretical disappointment or a real one. She imagines his hands, not Willy's, gliding over her dress in the darkness; she feels his breath on her neck, and sees his eyes, not Willy's, narrowing with boyish distrust at their first disagreement. He is a doctor, too, and Miss Armstrong's warning applies to him as well as to Willy. He, too, will have wants. He, too, will need to control.

With the last patient seen and the work table cleared enough for those who will soon take over for the evening shift, Dr. Bleaker disappears into his office, lab coat flapping, and closes the door behind him. With angry, sudden movements, one swift infuriated look in Florence's direction, Willy strides in the opposite direction, out of sight into the clinic annex. The door slams. Florence half expects the young doctor to do the same, but he waits, calf-eyed, by the workbench as though expecting an explanation.

“Come,” she says, and they walk together into the annex and put on their coats. His movements are slow and watchful like those of a dog expecting punishment.

He opens the door for Florence and they step into a light evening rain. He stands some yards off, wondering, it seems, how to take his leave. “You don't seem exactly overjoyed at this new turn of events, Doctor,” Florence ventures.

“I don't understand,” a reedy voice replies. He holds a half-cupped hand over one brow as though shielding his eyes from the sun, which makes little sense to Florence as they are under cloud cover and rain continues to fall.

“It seems we have just declared our intention to marry, Doctor. Perhaps we should get to know each other a little.”

She's aware, even as the words leave her, that if he had reacted earlier as she expected—with unbridled happiness—she might have spoken quite differently. She would have made sure he understood that the lie was merely to save his career. The punishment was too heavy, she would have told him. Let this close call be a lesson to you.

But his reticence has sparked something. She is annoyed that he has backed away from the possibility of success. And there is something else, something more difficult to understand and justify in her mind. In truth, she likes some quality in his rashness. Recklessness is generous. It creates situations and stirs people up. In a mysterious, distorted way, the young man has been mimicking the life in those gospel verses. He has returned her to the schoolroom, when her senses first dived beyond the musty pages inhaling the smell of the sand, feeling the heat of the desert sun. Once more she thunders through the temple with Jesus as he overturns the tables of the merchants. Once more she feels the odd tingle of disobedience, the pleasure of dislodging expectations. There is holiness in risk, spontaneity, absence of self-regard. He has awakened this counterpart in rashness and daring in herself, and she has remembered its power and its freedom. Under this influence she has saved him with a few words and possibly altered the course of her own life. She wants to see this side of him again, becomes almost desperate for it now as they stand in the rain.

“You're playing with me,” he says, unsmiling.

“No.” She takes a step forward.

“Why would you talk of marrying me?” His lips turn down at the words like those of an embarrassed child.

“Why not? You wanted to marry me.”

“That was different.” His eyes remain wounded and wary, but his hand lowers from his brow at last. They are both getting wet.

“No, it wasn't. You found me. You reached inside and here I am. Don't tell me you're afraid.”

He seems to loosen up and gather movement around his shoulders. His eyes search hers for confirmation.

“You've got what you wanted, Doctor,” she says. “I'll put it in writing if you want.”

“What about . . . ?” His eyes wander to the clinic door and his mouth forms a
G
.

“Gone. Forgotten.”

At last it comes: a smile, tentative and uncertain. Rainwater slides freely over her face now and darkens his hair.

“Come on, Doctor,” she says, “let's get in out of the rain.”