by Pirie, David
‘I am aware years make little difference,’ I said gently. She looked at me closely. ‘But is there something else troubling you now?’
‘It is stupid.’ She gave a sad little smile. ‘But I will tell you if you do not laugh. A road. A road has given me bad dreams.’
It was about the last thing I expected her to say. ‘A road?’ I replied.
‘Or a part of it, at least, which runs by a wood. I always hated the place. But I cycle it every day, for it leads to the rectory where my aunt and uncle live.’ She fingered a little locket that hung round her neck.
‘And have you seen something on this road?’
She hesitated. ‘At first just … a shape in the trees. I put it down to imagination. My uncle says I have far too much of it. But the truth is that now, yes, I see … a figure … a cyclist. It follows me, doctor.’
‘And you have seen the figure close?’
‘Never. Though from a distance …’ she struggled. ‘I know this will seem foolish, but it is as if … as if it has no eyes.’ It was pitiful to see the fear in her now. I kept quiet, wanting her to continue. ‘If I stop, it does not appear. Once I turned and the figure turned back, and again it was gone. If I am accompanied, it never comes.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And this has been some weeks.’ It was a pitiful response and it got the answer it deserved.
‘I know how it sounds.’ And she put out her hands for her gloves.
‘No,’ I said more forcefully. ‘I am glad you told me. I am a doctor and I will of course look into your symptoms. But if this other matter troubles you there is an easy way forward. I would consider it a privilege if you would let me at least investigate your small puzzle. I merely need, after all, to observe your daily journey on the road. I once knew someone who took an interest in such matters. I would do my best to help.’
‘I would be so relieved.’ She leant forward towards me, her eyes shining with gratitude. ‘All I want is someone with a little common sense to shed some light.’
‘Then’, said I, ‘all I want is the loan of a bicycle.’
And so it was that I found myself on a dull November afternoon crouched in a ditch by a lonely stretch of moorland road. Looking around me, it was certainly hard not to sympathise with Miss Grace’s feelings about this place.
A few hundred yards to my right along the road stood a gibbet where, it was said, highwaymen were once hanged. Behind was the moor itself, dank and forbidding. But worst of all was the dark, oppressive wood in front, which crowded in on that road like a black, swirling fog. When I had started out from town it had seemed a reasonably warm day, but now the dank undergrowth in that ditch made me feel as if I were crouched in cold water and I was shivering.
We had agreed that I would be in position by four o’clock and about fifteen minutes later a figure on a bicycle appeared in the distance. The shadows were lengthening and I could not see it clearly at first, but as it came closer I was able to make out the elegant figure of Miss Grace. I had not told her precisely where I would hide and she was cycling along, keeping her face firmly forward. But her clenched jaw and fixed expression as she passed showed what an ordeal this journey had become. Soon she was receding and I waited hopefully, my eyes fixed on the road.
All was still, apart from a pigeon fluttering into a tree opposite. I kept watching but saw nothing. There was not the slightest sign of anyone else at all. Indeed, now she was out of sight, the road could hardly have been more deserted. I stayed there twenty minutes longer, then, with a slightly heavy heart, I got out my bicycle and cycled after her.
She was waiting for me expectantly by the gate to a pleasant ivy-clad rectory. I dismounted beside her. ‘Did you see him?’ she asked, as she looked up at me, pushing back a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her ear. Her eyes were wide with hope.
‘I fear I saw nobody at all,’ I said.
It was heart-rending to see her face fall, but there was still defiance in it. ‘So what do you think of me now, Doctor? Either I must be a liar or I am going mad.’
‘No,’ I said with more firmness than I felt. ‘All I can tell you is I did not see him. Did you?’
She looked at me very directly. ‘What if I say he was beside me the whole time?’ If she meant it, I would have to pass her to another doctor for she would be well beyond my help. So I waited. ‘The truth’, she said, breaking the silence, ‘is that I did not look back.’
My relief must have been obvious. ‘Then we cannot be sure of anything yet, not even if this has anything to do with your eyes. It may simply be that he saw me.’
‘Yes, I thought of that and I am grateful to you.’ She came forward a little. ‘I want nothing but to be believed.’
I was about to say something when suddenly a window was thrown open behind us and there came a great shout. I think her name was called, though the tone was so fierce that I could not be sure.
Her expression changed at once. ‘Thank you for your help, even if it came to nothing. I will not forget it. I would …’
But I was not destined to know what she was about to say, because the front door opened and she turned to move away.
A moment later, as I was riding down the drive, I did look back at the house. Heather Grace had already reached its porticoed entrance and there I saw the owner of the voice, an elderly man with a large, muscular face. I do not know if he saw me, but I could understand now why she hurried.
THE STRANGE PRACTICE
As I cycled back to the town, I found myself wishing that I could confide this odd little adventure to my employer. Nothing could or should have been more natural. But it will soon be clear enough why such a course of action was utterly impossible.
Until he offered me employment, I had only seen Cullingworth, who was older than me, once since he left Edinburgh. At the time I was in my last year at university and he was struggling with a difficult practice and risked bankruptcy. Debts had piled up and, though deeply ashamed, he had dragooned me into a month’s locum work as a favour. I did not resent this for I felt I was helping a friend. Yet after that I never heard another thing from him until I had graduated and was actively seeking work, having just returned from overseas. It was then I received his telegram:
COME BY NEXT TRAIN IF POSSIBLE STOP STARTED HERE LAST JUNE STOP COLOSSAL SUCCESS STOP FORTUNES TO BE MADE AND THE ONLY MEDICAL COMPETITION ARE FOOLS STOP NO MORE DEBTS CULLINGWORTH
Perhaps, if it had not been so welcome, the tone of this message should have alerted me to the change in the man. At university, when I first met him, James Heriot Turnavine Cullingworth was reckless and arrogant. But he was loyal and he was spirited, and his passionate outbursts could be a pleasant counterweight to the conceit of our teachers. Certainly the moment I got off the train in that south-coast town, his exuberance and recklessness were fully in evidence. He was entertaining three ladies he had evidently just met, regaling them with his heroic exploits as a doctor, but they were dismissed in an instant.
‘Wonderful to see you, laddie,’ he said with a great roar. ‘Why, it seems an age since university.’ He set off at a great pace, leaving me struggling with my shabby portmanteau to keep up. ‘You know why we’re going to clean this town out?’ He flung the question over his shoulder as he strode through the station’s entrance hall.
‘No,’ I answered, struggling to keep up, ‘but I think you are going to tell me.’
‘Because’, he continued as he walked, ‘we both know that etiquette is merely a dodge for keeping the business in the hands of older men. But my father was a doctor, so I was born inside the machine and know all the wires. I have cast etiquette to the devil and you will see the result. Already the doctors in this place find it hard to get butter to their bread and when we work together they’ll have to eat it dry. But that is not all. I propose we start a newspaper.’
‘I am open to all suggestions,’ I said as we turned up the street. He had moderated his pace and I had recovered my breath. ‘But you are a doctor, not a
journalist.’
‘I am anything I want to be,’ he replied, looking at me in a rather strange way. It was my first indication of how easily he took offence.
We were now close to a rather large town house with a small courtyard and outbuildings. Even from far away I could see a great crowd of people swarming around the entrance. We stopped in front of his imposing brass plaque:
DR J CULLINGWORTH
I was astonished by the throng and Cullingworth watched my emotion with great pleasure as his locum, a somewhat harassed-looking young man with fair hair, came scurrying up.
‘Ah,’ said Cullingworth, ‘here is Baynes, who spends far too much time at the gaming table. Baynes, this is Dr Doyle come to join us. Waiting rooms full?’
‘A hundred and forty, sir,’ said Baynes pointing a delicate hand, ‘and the stable’s full too. There’s just some room in the coach house.’
Cullingworth turned to me. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t got a crowded day for you, Doyle.’
‘So is there a shortage of doctors?’ I asked in amazement as we entered the crowded hallway.
‘A shortage,’ cried Cullingworth. ‘By the devil, the streets are blocked with them. You couldn’t fall out of a window in this town without killing a doctor.’
All around us patients were milling frantically, though many of them looked so poor and wretched I wondered how they could ever afford a doctor. There was a ragged queue pressed against the wall, where a large sign read:
FREE CONSULTATIONS BUT PAY FOR YOUR MEDICINE
Here, it seemed was the attraction of the practice, for people were pointing to it and chattering, while one man, who had evidently waited for a glimpse of the doctor, shouted, ‘You promise to give free consultation, Doctor?’
Cullingworth ignored him and everyone else, pushing his way down a large, overcrowded corridor. ‘Pooh,’ he said taking out his handkerchief, ‘what an atmosphere. Can you not open the windows? I never saw such folk. Not one with the sense to open the window to save himself from suffocation.’
‘But there’s a screw through the sash, sir,’ protested a lanky individual with a bushy beard and torn trousers.
‘Ah, laddie,’ said Cullingworth striding over to it, ‘but you’ll never get on in the world if you can’t open a window without raising a sash. Look!’ And he grabbed a man’s umbrella and smashed it through two panes of glass. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘Baynes, talk to someone about taking the screw out. Now, Doyle, let’s get to work.’
He led me to a consulting room which was smaller than his own. ‘Sorry to give you the smaller, laddie, but it will do for now. You have surgery, which is not, I fear, of great importance and you won’t see many patients. I prescribe, which is where our fortune is made. You have a lot to learn.’ He went to the window and looked out happily at the throng of patients in his courtyard. Then he turned back and fixed his eye on me. ‘Two rules on patients. Never let them see you want them and don’t be polite. Break them in early and keep them to heel. Here!’
With that he sprang to the door and bellowed out into the house, ‘Stop all this confounded jabbering down there! I might as well be living in a poultry house. Form an orderly line and I will begin my consultations shortly.’
‘But do you not offend them?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘Of course I do and offence, laddie, is the finest advertisement in the world. Put a high price on yourself and they assume genius. I tell you, when I go to Harley Street I shall see patients from midnight to two in the morning and charge bald-headed people double.’
Now, at last, I began to grasp the true reason for his telegram. What should have given the game away was the phrase ‘No more debts’. Cullingworth did not really need my assistance at all. There were plenty of men like Baynes to assist him for a paltry sum if he needed them. But he was still deeply ashamed that I had once encountered him when he was in debt and wanted to trumpet his success to me. I had been summoned here purely to feed the man’s vanity.
It was not, indeed, long before I concluded that all Cullingworth’s negative qualities, so familiar from our student days, had been magnified a hundredfold, while the only tolerable one, loyalty, had all but gone. He had, in short, turned into the most conceited, inquisitive, domineering, competitive, boastful and generally infuriating individual I had ever encountered. And as for his highly lucrative practice, of which I was now a part, it was run like a weird combination of brothel and circus.
Cullingworth had, as he said, appointed me as the surgeon, which in fact meant I had very little to do, for surgery was the last thing his clientele demanded. All the money was made from prescriptions, which were handed out from the neat little dispensary at the end of the corridor by his pretty assistant Hettie. My first impression of this space was a mass of glasses and jars. But then I saw the piles of gleaming coins and knew I had reached the heart of this little goldmine.
Once they were lured by the promise of a free consultation, even his poorest patients could evidently be persuaded to buy the medicines he prescribed. And, of course, Cullingworth’s own patent medicines came top of the list. Tonics were the speciality of his house. There were tonics for excessive tea drinking, tonics for poor circulation, tonics for choleric disposition, tonics for stiffness of the joints; nerve tonic, bowel tonic, iron tonic, every kind of tonic. I could have endured this, I suppose, if his patients had been rich, but it was obvious they were not. And so, predictably enough, it was Cullingworth’s zeal for tonic that caused the first quarrel between us, one which had a bearing on all that followed.
The incident occurred late on my very first day, when I had very little to do and was standing at the door to my room. The queue of patients outside Cullingworth’s door was thinning because it was late. Inside, I could hear him talking earnestly to an old woman. ‘The way is to drink less tea,’ he was saying. ‘You suffer from tea poisoning and here are two prescriptions for my own patents. A shilling each, but it is what you need.’
At that moment I became aware of a commotion down at the end of the corridor. Someone was shouting and a woman screamed. I rushed along to find that a man of about forty with crutches and a wide, livid scar on his neck, had fainted dead away.
‘He has been in the campaigns, sir,’ said a stout man as I loosened the poor fellow’s collar. ‘Had a bayonet in his neck from the look of it.’
That winter, the streets were full of soldiers who been maimed in the terrible war against the Boers in Africa and this man’s wounds were as bad as any I had seen. I managed to prop his head up a little and checked his pulse, finding that it was steady if a little weak. Then his eyes opened and he looked at me. ‘When did you last eat?’ I asked.
‘I had nothing today or yesterday, sir. I was saving for the doctor’s prescription. For the tonic.’
I had already heard enough about tonic to last me a lifetime and the thought of this poor old soldier depriving himself of food in order to purchase it made my blood boil.
‘Use your money to buy soup, bread and a bit of meat,’ I said. ‘You need it more than any tonic. If your war pension leaves anything spare at the end of the week, then return but never put it ahead of food. One of these people must help you home.’
The man was walked out and I went back down the corridor to find Cullingworth himself blocking my way.
‘What in heaven’s name are you doing, laddie?’ he said. ‘If you have nothing better to do than turn away my patients, we part company now. I told you how we make our money here. The prescriptions are the bedrock of the practice.’ A furious row followed, and a little later he angrily insisted on marching me through the town streets, carrying a great bag of coins that his patients had delivered and jingling it loudly as he passed the other doctors’ houses.
I do not, however, want to give the impression that Cullingworth and I were estranged from the first. Being lonely and poor I was, initially, in no position to take the moral high ground, and was grateful enough for his company and the employment he off
ered. I had noticed, too, that in his treatment of patients, despite the endless prescribing, he sometimes showed great perspicacity and I still believe he had amazing intuition. On these early evenings, after our work was finished, we would drink brandy by his ample fireside, talking about every subject under the sun including even detection, though of course I never revealed my own experience.
I recall he also took a particular interest in the book I happened to be reading, which was Mary Godwin’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. ‘That story’, he observed, ‘is an astonishing achievement.’ He went on to a bombastic lecture about its qualities.
I admired the book, but a part of me wanted to take air out of his balloon. ‘Still,’ I replied, ‘in places its science is palpably absurd. The narrator talks of anatomy, yet there is hardly any here. The only hint of it is his collection of bones from charnel houses to build a being of gigantic stature. He claims this will make his task easier. But why in the world would it be easier to create a giant than an ordinary man? I am utterly baffled how the thing could stand on its skeletal legs at all, let alone walk or breathe!’
Cullingworth leapt to his feet in excitement as he saw the point. ‘You mean it would collapse under its own weight?’
‘Certainly.’ I warmed to my theme. ‘And there is worse to follow. This man reaches the end of his labour, succeeds in his experiment and, just at the pinnacle of success, while his creation is being born, what does he do? I will tell you. He has second thoughts, abandons his experiment and takes to his bed! No scientist who ever lived could or would do such a thing.’ I slapped the book down, feeling pleased with my analysis, which I could see had made my host rather uncomfortable for he hated to be outdone at anything.
He paced up and down, frowning. ‘But even so,’ he came back at last. ‘The idea of creating something that has a life of its own, even after you have finished with it, which takes on its own shape and form. What he calls “the workshop of filthy creation”. That is power, Doyle. One day, I tell you, I will write such a novel that when they read the first chapter the folk will start a riot until the second comes out. Soon they will be in rows around my door fighting the patients in their hope of hearing what is coming.’