Therefore Choose (11 page)

“In just a few months you will come over there. Then I'll come over here in the summer.”

Anna did not reply.

“We have to think of what's best for both of us, and think towards how to do it.”

“You find me too demanding. Is that it?”

“I haven't said you're demanding,” he said.

“It is what you think.”

“I think it will be difficult, writing letters and being apart for months, but I think we can do it, and before we know where we are, I shall have finished medical school and be able to earn my living. Then we can make plans.”

George felt he had averted a crisis. He felt that, by moving forward little by little, all would be well. There was no need for a sudden and implausible decision. He would have time to think, time to persuade Anna to live in England.

George was perhaps too young to wonder whether, after they got back from the Café Bauer, Anna had sat by herself and cried, too young to imagine that she might feel vulnerable. He would not have known that she wanted his presence to fortify her own resolution. He would not have known whether, with his reluctance to stay in Berlin, some important change might have occurred in the way in which she thought about him. And she, of course, was too proud to let him see any such thing.

George returned to London
. Werner went to Freiburg, to become caught up in German philosophy and in the question of how minds might join. Anna stayed in Berlin.

Cambridge medical students had to go to one of the teaching hospitals and join a group of students they didn't know. George was in London, at University College Hospital. The atmosphere was different from Cambridge. After the obligatory purchase of a stethoscope, students took courses with hospital consultants: different people from the gown-wearing lecturers at Cambridge. They had what George recognized as gravitas. They were people of consequence. Before the students had to face their first live patient, the consultants gave lectures and demonstrations.

The first lecture, by a physician, was on how to address a patient and take a history, the account that a patient would give of the course of an illness. This was to be followed by classes on how to conduct the examination of the patient by palpation, auscultation, and listening through the emblematic stethoscope to the beatings of the heart, the breathings of the lungs, and the pulsing of the brachial artery as one gradually released air from the cuff of the sphygmomanometer and noted the readings of a patient's blood pressure.

The first lecture was given in a small lecture theatre with raked seats. It was not just a lecture; it included a demonstration.

“History and examination,” said the consultant, a tall, distinguished-looking man in an immaculate three-piece suit, suave in the way medical school consultant physicians are supposed to be.

“First the history,” he said. “More important than anything you've learned in anatomy or physiology. Before putting a hand on the patient, observe. Pause, reflect on what you see.”

In a new notebook George had written as a heading History. On the next line he wrote, First, observe. He leaned forward, prompted by the announcement of the importance of the occasion. On the floor of the lecture theatre were the props, a deal table and two chairs. To one side, standing near the door of the theatre, was a member of the medical school staff who had on a brown coat of the kind worn by men who served in hardware shops.

“I'm going to show you a patient,” said the consultant, regarding the class. “Someone I've not seen before.”

He turned to the man in the brown coat: “Is the patient ready, Prentice? Be so kind as to show her in.”

The man opened the door and in walked a small, thin woman who was perhaps in her mid-forties, with greying hair that looked as if it had just been released from curlers.

“Say ‘Good morning' if you must,” said the consultant to the class. “Don't rush. Patients don't mind waiting. That's why they're called patients.”

George looked at the consultant. Did he make this joke every year?

The consultant turned away from the class, took two steps to the table, opened the cover of a folder, and glanced at it.

“Good morning, Mrs. Grayling,” he said. “Please sit down … this chair here.”

The consultant, still standing, addressed the class again: “Notice how I have had the chairs arranged. Not so I have to look at her across the table, like your bank manager, but at the corner. Informality is important. Puts the patient at her ease.”

Informality, wrote George.

“What have you noticed so far?” said the consultant. “What did you observe as the patient came in and sat down? Observations, anyone? You there, in the second row, what did you observe?”

It was noon when the consultant left the lecture theatre, followed by Mrs. Grayling and the brown-coated Prentice. What George observed was that he was sitting next to one of the few women in the class. He looked at her as the performance ended.

“Well …” he said.

“For goodness sake,” said the woman. She spoke in a thick Irish accent. “Thank God that's finished. How embarrassing. Talking about that woman in front of her, as if she's not there, or as if she's a specimen in a glass case.”

George smiled at her.

“I'm Bernardette,” she said. “Bernardette McGohern. Are you going to have lunch?”

She had light brown hair, down to her shoulders, and soft-skinned cheeks.

“George Smith,” replied George. “I'm pleased to meet you. You mean at the refectory?”

In the year before George started at Cambridge, his mother had got a job as the head of a primary school in Leytonstone, in East London, and had moved there. She did not remarry and, three years after they had moved, Gwen married and left home, so Mrs. Smith lived alone until George returned to London. She seemed pleased enough, then, to have her son come to live with her again.

The house had three floors, and, out of the way, up steep stairs at the top of the house, George occupied two rooms: a bedroom and a room with a few books and a worktable. He went back and forth to University College Hospital on the Central Line. His mother washed his clothes, cooked his meals, and usually they ate together. He talked about the hospital, sometimes about Anna and what she said about Germany. George's mother talked about the teachers at her school. George had thought that it was his father who had been the religious one, but with his father's death his mother seemed to have taken up the religious part, and she talked about the church she went to. They weren't demonstrative with each other.

The lectures and demonstrations about how to take histories, how to listen down a stethoscope, how to elicit a reflex kick by tapping a tendon in the patient's knee with a patella hammer, were finished. The students each joined a firm. The head of the firm was a consultant, below him a registrar, below him, the houseman, below him, half a dozen students. George's firm was neurology. The students' job was to take histories when new patients were admitted, visit the neurology patients as they sat in their beds, make sure charts were up to date, report changes to the houseman, sit in on outpatient clinics, and each lunchtime attend a post-mortem, which was performed by the consultant pathologist. But the students were not on call all night as were the housemen. They did not have to go without sleep. George's evenings and weekends were still his own.

Sometimes at the end of a day, George would go for a drink with two or three other students. He stayed close to Peter Bailiss, who seemed to have reconstituted Cambridge in Whitehall. Some evenings George would phone his mother to say he wouldn't be home until late. He'd sit up into the night with a group of Peter's colleagues, talking as they had at Trinity.

He kept in touch, too, with Douglas Hinton, who had started his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a junior fellowship and rooms in King's. One Saturday at the beginning of November, George took the train to Cambridge, and slept on the couch in Douglas's sitting room.

“You can come any time,” said Douglas. “I don't think one's supposed to have people to stay, but I'm on good terms with the bedder. She won't say anything.”

George felt nostalgic for Cambridge. Leytonstone seemed a poor exchange.

“You went to Germany in the summer,” said Douglas. “How was it?”

“Berlin was fine,” said George. “Too many men in uniform for my taste, but they don't bother you.”

“After Christmas, I'm going to Würzburg for a couple of months. There's a technique I've got to learn there.”

Most evenings George went back to the house in Leytonstone and ate with his mother before going up to his attic rooms. He thought he and his mother had become like an old married couple for whom everything except mealtimes had fallen away. It would have been better to live closer to town, but this was cheaper and it wasn't bad. Having him in the house seemed to be enough for his mother, and because — he thought — she felt he was doing the right thing, moving up in the world to become a doctor, she was less critical of him than she had been when he was younger. She seemed, even, to think of him as an adult.

For George and Anna, it was love at a distance. They wrote each weekend, so that each could look forward to the arrival of a letter during the week.

In his fourth letter, George wrote that his short story about the old man who had nearly been knocked over, and the dissection room, had been accepted for a magazine.

In December Anna travelled to London, to stay with George. He was anxious about her coming to stay in his mother's house.

“Will it be all right if Anna stays here?” he said.

“Why should it not be?” said his mother.

George's mother was not much of a one for jokes, but he saw she was teasing. He was grateful that she seemed not to be taking her religion too far.

“She can stay in my room, upstairs,” said George.

“There are no children in the house.”

When Anna arrived, George's mother was polite to her, even welcoming.

George was embarrassed to invite Anna to his attic room with its bed, its two cheap bedside tables, its washstand, its pale wardrobe, and its chest of drawers. He remembered the top floor of the building near the Tiergarten station: the beautifully furnished, book-filled flat in which they'd lived for half a summer in charm and comfort.

Anna didn't seem to mind, and when George apologized, she said, “Don't be silly.”

On the evening of Anna's arrival, George tried to counteract the effect of Leytonstone by taking her out to somewhere mildly exotic, in Soho. The food was good, the evening was a success, they drank a bottle of wine. They felt close again.

They made the tube journey back to the house, and found that George's mother had left the hall light on for them. They climbed the stairs and, on the top landing, they switched it off. In the bedroom, a wan ray from a street light came through the window. Almost shyly, they undressed. Anna took off her cardigan, then her skirt and blouse, then her underwear, and folded them all onto the chair on which George usually put his clothes. He laid his clothes, now, under a bedside table. From opposite sides of the bed, he and Anna slid under the covers, reached for each other, held each other. George felt whole once more. He expelled from his mind a thought that his mother, downstairs, whatever she had said, would disapprove.