Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Honeymoon?’

  ‘We got married at Caxton Hall on the way through. Didn’t Jane tell you? She’s the next best thing to the Voice of America, I was sure you’d be tuned in.’

  Jane gave a wry moue of, what, irony? Regret? In fact, she looked so happy in a distracted way that the expression seemed to have trouble sticking to her face.

  ‘Gus here was one of the last of us to see John alive.’

  ‘I know that, dear.’

  ‘Course you do. And he was at the mission, too, with Helen. We were all there.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘The way it was, Gus, first thing I did after the funeral which was a very lovely occasion at Coopers Ferry, the old Stilwell place, first thing I did was to invite Mrs Stilwell down to the farm for a change of scene and –’

  ‘Dodo, perhaps we could talk about this all another time?’

  ‘Sure, anything you say, we’ve got a hell of a lot to talk about. Say, wasn’t that coal strike something? We had 50,000 tons sitting over at Rotterdam, just as a first instalment you understand, but those goddamn dockers wouldn’t shift a single sack. Why, look at that sun, it’s going to be a great day. You had your breakfast? Well, excuse us, I’m in a mood to run right through the menu this morning, they know I’m coming and if they can’t do it right for me then God help the rest of the passengers.’

  Cackling with satisfaction, he brushed aside the swing doors and sailed through into the dining-room. Jane paused as though to stay behind and bring me up to date but then thought better of it and gave me one of her quick, nervous smiles that really did come from her heart and pierced mine. It was, I suppose, her most typical and touching way of reaching out, though it was not entirely easy to interpret. Perhaps its ambiguity was part of its charm. How fond we would be of each other if life were easier and we had more time: that was one way of decoding it. But then there was another not quite conflicting interpretation, which implied that the fault was not life’s but hers, viz, we are in such sympathy and I am so fond of you, so very fond, but I am also a hopeless person and everything I attempt in the line of love (or perhaps in any line) comes to grief.

  The thought came to me soon enough, to be precise about five seconds after she had thrown me her signature smile and followed her – well, it had to be said – her husband through the swing doors. Presumably, the thought went, she had thrown Dodo several of these hopeless smiles while he was showing her his glossy hunters in his honeysuckle-twined paddocks. And in such circumstances – her tragic widowhood, Dodo’s last hours with John, their long association – the smiles would count double, being sodden with Destiny. Meanwhile, Tucker – what about Tucker? The first Mrs Wilmot, the brindled doppelgänger, seemed to have been erased from the story with clinical, almost Stalinist indifference. Where was she now? Abandoned in Reno or some other place where you could get a quickie divorce, or returned down south to her roots, mournfully sipping too many mint juleps on the verandah of a widowed aunt?

  Then another thought: John Stilwell’s last days in Africa, his doomed safari (not quite a safari, really, but safari sounded better than investment project reconnaissance), Dodo’s long friendship with Jane, his clumsy but tender comforting – none of this might have done the trick without a case of good old mistaken identity. Jane coming in from the garden carrying a bunch of honeysuckle perhaps, with the light behind her, only her outline distinct, the elegant bunching of the Presidential queue unmistakable, or so Dodo had thought and, perhaps a little overcome with the scent of the honeysuckle, had swept her into his arms with a tender yawp of ‘Mother’ and had held her in a long embrace from which she had, on present evidence, shown no inclination to disentangle herself.

  ‘Come see my ship,’ burbled Dodo fed and happy at my ear, the aromas of bacon and fries and eggs benedict streaming around me in the fresh light breeze. We were going about now in the narrow channel, very slow and gingerly – like a goddamn elephant in a boudoir, Dodo chuckled. The prow of the boat seemed almost to nuzzle the tip of the island with the ruined tower, its lichened stones a silvery grey-green against the richer green of the low pastures behind it.

  ‘Hey this is the life, if the Zeph don’t cure you, I don’t know nothing on God’s earth that will.’

  Mm, I assented, drawing as deep a lungful of air as I could manage and then puffing it out over the rail.

  ‘You asthmatic, or emph, or general bronchial?’

  ‘Asthmatic, well, used to be but not any more.’ I stared at him in some surprise and he stared back.

  ‘So what the hell you doing on mah boat?’ His new persona as shipping magnate seemed to bring on a touch of the South in his voice.

  Puzzled by his question, I tried to recall whether Bobs had somehow defrauded the shipping line, then recollected that it was I who was defrauding the British government by snaffling the money they had given me for the airfare.

  I told Dodo that a friend had given me his firm’s complimentary ticket.

  ‘Well, good for him, the more folks we can get acquainted with the Zephyr experience, the more of ’em will come back again. And to tell you the truth, a shipload of sick folks gets kinda depressing now and then, though, mind you, plenty of them bring their loved ones along for the ride.’

  ‘Sick folks?’ I mumbled, trying to keep up with his booming stride along the deck.

  ‘You mean your friend didn’t tell you? This is the only floating clinic for respiratory diseases you ever likely to see. Who wants to be stuck in some crummy hotel with their face stuck in an oxygen mask when they could be inhaling God’s own oxygen and getting the world’s best treatment just down the passage? I’ll have you meet Dr Guderian, he’s the tops.’

  As we went on round the deck, the sun finally drew clear of the mist and the first passengers began to emerge and reserve the teak steamer chairs with their rugs and books. One or two still wore pyjamas and dressing-gowns with scarves wound round their necks, as though they intended only to catch a quick breath before going back down again. But others were fully dressed and came muffled for a longer outing, sometimes taking two trips to assemble their equipment. Towards the stern, we passed Mrs Fitch. She was reading Volume Three of Runciman’s History of the Crusades and gave me a big smile and a thumbs-up sign.

  ‘It’s a great project. You can charge 10, 20 per cent above the standard cruise rates and the medical bills cost you less than half of that and I’m talking about top-quality medical care here. I’m talking Alfred H. Guderian MD and a string of other letters after his name. Matter of fact, he’s a cousin of Guderian the inventor of the German armoured corps. I was a tank guy myself, so that created a bond between us. Second cousin, I think he said. You see anything of Helen now?’

  ‘Yes, actually she saw me off yesterday.’

  ‘Did she now? I don’t mind telling you I’ve still got a lot of time for that little lady.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Well, she’s kinda gone off me, I fear I may have alienated her somewhat.’

  He gave a mysterious cackle, or at any rate a cackle intended to provoke me to ask him why.

  ‘The answer’s kinda confidential.’

  ‘That’s more or less what she said.’

  ‘She’s a good girl, and I respect her for respecting my confidence. A lot of broads would have used the opportunity to take a little revenge.’

  ‘How? What sort of revenge?’

  ‘You ask too many questions, my friend.’

  He chuckled again and patted me on the back.

  ‘I’ve been lucky with my women, luckier’n I had a right to be, that’s for sure.’

  He sighed and blinked at the sun, much moved by the thought of his good fortune.

  ‘Tucker now, you remember Tucker, you couldn’t not remember Tucker. She’s a great girl, a really great girl and I don’t want any misunderstanding about that.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘And as you might imagine, I haven’t treated her right. It wouldn’t tak
e any great perspicacity to guess that, would it now? You wouldn’t need to have a PhD in personal relations to deduce that the first Mrs Waldo H. Wilmot has had a raw deal out of life. All right, so she went off with the tennis pro, that’s her privilege, in her position I’d be sorely tempted to go off with the tennis pro – even if he did happen to be a two-bit guinea who serves like a girl.’

  Something like displeasure spread across his mild bulbous features. We walked on, passing Mrs Fitch again, now snuggled down in her steamer chair but not too swaddled to give me another thumbs-up. The sight of the chairs filling up restored Dodo’s humour and he began bestowing benevolent smiles on his tenantry.

  ‘You’ll find Dr Guderian in the therapy lounge,’ the girl in Heavensent fuchsia at Clinic Reception told us with a breathless gulp as though to suggest a treat in store. We went through what looked like a consulting-room into a sort of cramped gym where a row of half a dozen elderly persons were sitting facing us. They were engaged in what looked suspiciously like the breathing exercises I had been forced to practise twice a day in my teens and which, according to a pushy doctor I had recently met on holiday, were now regarded as useless. The passengers/patients were being led through the ritual by a short nurse with frizzy ginger hair and a listless adenoidal voice.

  But it was the onlooker standing with his back to us who drew my attention. He was clearly part of the team, wearing a tunic and trousers in the Heavensent livery, both garments piped along the seams in navy blue, and fuchsia-pink deck shoes with navy-blue rims.

  Surely no, it couldn’t be, but the set of that massive head on those broad shoulders, the posture brooding and inquisitorial . . . And as he swung round to greet us, that saturnine profile, simultaneously fleshy and hawklike conveying its unlikely combination of willpower and melancholy. Though we had not met for a decade, no, quite a bit more, and I had long ago concurred in my father’s premature diagnosis that I had grown out of it and was as cured as ever anyone could hope to be, I could not repress a shudder on once again encountering Dr Maintenon-Smith, the self-styled Napoleon of Asthma.

  ‘Nicky, my dear boy. What a pleasure. No one told me that you were sailing with us.’

  ‘Gus,’ I said, ‘actually.’

  ‘Gus, of course. You still look so like Nicky, I always mixed you two up.’

  There had been no Nicky at the clinic, but I had no room to ponder that, being unable to stop goggling at the little white plastic name-tag attached to his left lapel. The tunic was double-breasted, broad-lapelled with pink satin revers, adding to the Napoleonic feeling. He might have shrugged it on to sit for Ingres. What the name-tag said was Dr Alfred H. Guderian MD FRCP.

  ‘You two good people have met before?’ Dodo Wilmot’s earlier displeasure peeped out again at the thought of any connection he had no part in supervising.

  ‘We have indeed,’ said Dr Guderian (it seems simpler to use his alias). ‘He was a patient of mine the other side of the water. I never forget anyone who has been under my care.’

  ‘Bet he gave you one hell of a lot of trouble.’

  ‘On the contrary, he was a model patient, but medically a difficult case. His father, I believe it was, chose to remove him at an unfortunate moment, and I cannot say I am entirely surprised to find him on this voyage.’

  It occurred to me, for the first time, that my father might have taken me away from the clinic not because he thought I was cured but because he could no longer afford to pay the fees, perhaps indeed had not paid the fees for the previous term either. The glittering menace in Dr Guderian’s eye suggested that this might well be so and that this was one thing he had not forgotten.

  Dodo Wilmot began to laugh.

  ‘No, no, for once you’ve got the wrong diagnosis, Doc. This fellow’s sound as a bell. He’s just come along for the ride. I went all over Africa with him, never wheezed once.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear it. Sometimes I am surprised by the success of my own methods. Medicine is a humbling art. One never knows how little one knows, or how much, until Nature chooses to enlighten one. Gus, we must chew over old times, we have much to talk about.’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you two guys together, I need to go make a few calls. Thought he was a patient, I must tell Jane, she’ll just love it.’

  He disappeared chuckling.

  Dr Guderian took my arm, cradling my elbow as though it were bruised and needed careful handling, and led me out on deck.

  ‘It is a remarkable coincidence our meeting again and in such circumstances. I often think back to our high jinks at the clinic. It will not have escaped you that I am somewhat changed since those carefree days.’

  He raised his profile to the gentle morning breeze, inviting me to inspect it for decay, of which there was little sign – the jet-black hair a little sparser perhaps but if anything rather blacker, the eye still commanding as ever.

  ‘You look very well,’ I said.

  ‘You know that was not what I meant.’

  He tapped his name-tag.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘that is what you have been goggling at since the moment you set eyes on me again.’

  ‘Well, I was a little puzzled.’

  ‘You are right to be puzzled. At one moment you see me the respected Dr Maintenon-Smith, director of the foremost clinic of its sort in the South of England, on dining terms with the Chief Constable, and now here you see me Dr Guderian, a mere ship’s doctor. What is there going on? Is this an imposture, some bizarre type of conspiracy? Do I read your thoughts correctly, I am sure I do.’

  ‘Umm –’

  ‘Well, I will tell you the truth. As so often in this life, the truth is quite innocent but a little sad. Not tragic perhaps but sad. You remember my wife?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Madame Maintenon-Smith was a low-spirited unobtrusive figure who ran the Medical Stores at the clinic. She did not seem to care for the work and spoke little, and then mostly of her two grown-up sons, both working in Clermont-Ferrand.

  ‘Well, she died.’

  He threw out a hand over the rail, as though casting her ashes out over the sea. Then he paused.

  ‘I was a broken man, my life seemed finished, purposeless. I did not react well, I lost control. I who was dedicated to self-control – you may recall me saying in the old days that in love self-control is the most exquisite of all perversions – I became intemperate. I drank.’

  His voice resounded over the calm milky ocean. The Irish coast was now only a grey-green streak along the horizon. Dr Guderian had not lost Dr Maintenon-Smith’s manly baritone, at the same time hypnotic and stagy, so that he sounded as though he were repeating someone else’s words, now and then possibly with ironic intent.

  ‘My wife had always done the clinic accounts. Without her, I was as helpless as a baby. Mistakes were made. I hired a jackanapes from Worthing, he turned out to be a good-for-nothing. The Inland Revenue took a pettifogging view. It was an unpleasant period.’

  He shuddered at the recollection.

  ‘So the clinic –’

  ‘Is no more. I believe the creditors are hoping to reopen it as an hotel. The matter is of no interest to me. It is a dead chapter. I resolved to begin afresh.’

  ‘Under a new name.’

  ‘Under my real name.’

  He snorted with pleasure at my surprise.

  ‘Yes, I was born Alfred Guderian in a small Prussian town a few miles from my cousin Heine, the tank guy as your friend Mr Wilmot insists on calling him.’

  ‘But Maintenon-Smith?’

  ‘My wife was née Maintenon, a descendant, I believe, of the great Madame de Maintenon, the mistress and later wife of Louis Quatorze. How strange it was that the King who could have enjoyed every woman in France should have chosen to marry my wife’s ancestor, a very devout, very sensible woman, but a widow of a certain age. Just as Madame Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage, so Le Roi Soleil found in marriage with a bourgeoise all the excitements of adultery.
’

  How often had I heard Dr Maintenon-Smith spout these mots, pacing up and down the stone floors of our dormitory or the squeaky parquet of the classroom (the place was a school as well as a clinic for teenage wheezers). The only difference was that, in those days, he had claimed Madame de Maintenon as his own ancestor, an equally improbable boast, since I later discovered that Madame de Maintenon had no children and her family name was different in any case, Maintenon being merely the town she took her title from and only visited a couple of times in her life.

  ‘We met on the Isle of Man.’

  ‘The Isle of Man?’

  ‘I was interned there, as an enemy alien. I had been doing postgraduate work at Manchester when the war broke out. How it rained, in Manchester first and then on the Island. I had never seen such rain. Sometimes in my dreams I hear the gurgle of those boggy streams and the creak of the great water-wheel at Laxey. My wife was one of the camp interpreters, she was a linguist of some distinction.’

  His eyes filled with tears which he brushed aside with a curious motion of disdain, managing to convey at the same time his impatience with this moment of weakness and also a satisfaction in demonstrating that a large-souled man was not incapable of tears. My father would have approved. He had no time for a man who could not weep.

  ‘She was half-English?’

  ‘No, wholly French.’

  ‘But the Smith?’

  ‘Ah the wretched Smith.’

  He looked at me with sardonic condescension as though it was I who had somehow foisted the Smith on him.

  ‘That was a little jeu d’esprit, surely pardonable in those grey times. Towards the end of the war I was allowed to do a little doctoring and we made friends among the local gentry. We had noticed, my wife and I, how they prided themselves upon their double-barrelled surnames which were, after all, very ordinary names. Why should we too not have two barrels? Et voilà, Maintenon-Smith. We were received everywhere with the greatest respect. I do not think that, after the war, Dr Guderian would have had so many patients.’