A Time to Heal

by Claire Rayner

  “Oh, they stand up,” he said bleakly, going to the armchair by the fire, and stretching himself into it. “They stand up. They’ve developed a technique to apply the method in three hospitals—I saw it in action in Chicago. And they get impressive results. I saw three in vivo operations that were most impressive—virtually total removal of very large atheromatous (arteriosclerotic, they call them) plaques.”

  He turned his head to look at her then. “Do I sound peevish and jealous, Harriet? Objecting because the method works? Because, believe me, I’m not. I’m as excited as any one of the Americans about it. Damn it all, with coronary thrombosis the killer it is, not to mention the cerebral thromboses—Rosamund died of a stroke, remember, so I have a personal involvement—the fact that Ross-Craigie has published a method of preventing it is immensely exciting. No, my objection is that he made no mention whatsoever of the sources of so much of his success! I’m no chauvinist, but there’s enough of the Englishman in me to regret bitterly that English efforts should be ignored this way. And he is a shoddy worker, God damn him!”

  He stood up again, and began to move about the room, restlessly touching furniture and ornaments. “You know what happened! I just wasn’t prepared to let him bypass what I regard as essential safeguards before he published, and he made it clear he thought me overcautious, not to say obstructive. Obstructive! Me! You know that’s not true, Harriet!”

  “It certainly wasn’t as far as Ross-Craigie was concerned,” Harriet said, a little absentmindedly, for she was beginning to find Oscar’s tirade a shade wearing. And then, as she saw the expression on his face, she realized how foolish a remark she had made.

  “You mean I am obstructive as far as other people’s work is concerned? Is that what you mean?”

  “Oh, Oscar, no! Not precisely. You can be a little … well, discouraging about a piece of work that doesn’t fit your own ideas.”

  “That surely is what I’m there for, damn it all! What sort of Establishment would it be if I let every one of you rush off into whatever line of country you fancied? We haven’t the resources, as you well know, and this is unjust coming from you, Harriet, really it is! How long have you been working on that auto-inoculation scheme of yours? Two years! And how much have you to show for it? Yet I’ve cooperated with you, haven’t I?”

  Harriet opened her mouth to speak; now was undoubtedly the time to tell him of her own news. But he gave her no opportunity.

  “Have you—any of you—the least understanding of what my position involves? I control a meager enough budget, God knows, but it has to be accounted for—with results. Results that mean something to those bloody old women in Whitehall. And what results have any of you provided for me? Half a dozen tuppenyha’ penny tests. At the risk of seeming as conceited as Ross-Craigie, let me remind you that the only worthwhile one was my own Bell’s test. And when we do find a promising line of work, what happens? The man takes himself off with not only his own work done at Brookbank, but a hell of a lot of mine as well, and sells it to the highest bidder. My God, it makes me sick! I—”

  He stopped sharply. “You must forgive me, Harriet. To rant on in this fashion like—indeed, I’m worse than Ross-Craigie!” He smiled thinly, and came to stand beside her at the table and put one hand on her shoulder. “Such a popinjay it is! He’s got himself all tarted up in square glasses, and the most incredible clothes you ever saw—a complete caricature. I met him at some ghastly barbecue party, and he was wearing pink shorts—pink, so help me!—down to his knees, and anything less like a serious scientist you never saw. And when I ventured to suggest he’d been a little less than just in making no public mention of his Brookbank work—or of mine with him—my dear, he positively jiggled about with denials! I shouldn’t let so ridiculous a creature annoy me so much.” He kissed the top of her head then, and his hand tightened on her shoulder.

  “And it’s outrageous of me to talk so to you after not seeing you for so long. I should be ashamed of myself, and I am. Put it down to fatigue. I slept yesterday afternoon in London after my plane got in and it was an easy drive up this morning, but it takes a while to get over the time switch.”

  “Shall I go, then? If you’re so tired?” She looked up at him, not moving, and he smiled and shook his head.

  “You know damned well I’m not that tired. Come to bed.”

  She stood up. “Yes. Bed. I think you need it.”

  He laughed a little. “You mean you don’t? After the three months I’ve been away? Have you been comforting other sad widowers in my absence? Or even dear Theo?”

  “Not kind, Oscar—and beneath your dignity, I should have thought, to dig at Theo. He’s a damned good friend to both of us, and you know it. As for me—damn it, of course I’ve missed you! I’m past the age of playing the coquette, even if it would be believable, after almost twenty years ….”

  He frowned fleetingly. “Not quite so long, surely. Rosamund died in—ye Gods, I suppose it is! Eighteen years. Very comfortable years, though. Mmm? Probably more comfortable than if you’d married me—though I’ve a clear conscience on that score. I did suggest it several times.”

  She began to clear the table. “Twice to be precise. And not with any notable enthusiasm at that. But I’ve no regrets. They have been comfortable years—”

  She stopped. “Why are we talking as though they’re over? Are they?” And she was a little startled at the stab of apprehension she felt.

  “Good God, no! I sincerely hope not! I’ve no notion of dying for a good while yet, and you look in perfect health as usual! You were the one who started talking about how long it’s been, not I. My dear Harriet, aren’t you being a shade menopausal tonight? Flitting about in your conversation, and decidedly distracted. Half the evening I’ve had the feeling you weren’t even listening to me. Not flattering. Such a welcome home for a wandering man!”

  “I’m sorry! If I have been so, there is a reason—and ifs not the state of my hormones, damn you! My God, why is everyone so determined to remind me of my antiquity today? No, there’s a work thing—”

  “Then not another word. Tomorrow is soon enough. Tell me then.”

  “Conference day tomorrow.”

  “God, is it? I suppose it must be. Six months goes bloody fast. Well, conference or not tomorrow, now, bed. You need it too.”

  “Look, let’s stop deciding who is doing who a favor, shall we? I find it a little depressing, to say the least.”

  “I take your point. You can have the bathroom first.”

  Theo pushed a note across the table toward her, and she pulled herself out of her abstraction to read it.

  “Harriet, dear,” the highly stylized script ran. “Do try to look as though you are pretending to listen, at least! I know you are waiting to explode your own little bomb, but they don’t. And your expression of patent boredom isn’t too flattering to poor Geoffrey.”

  She smiled at him, crumpling the note into the ashtray, and obediently tried to listen. Geoffrey Cooper was reading lists of figures on his obesity work, the light glinting his glasses to a blankness that made him look like that cartoon character she used to enjoy when she was a child—who was it? Ah, yes. Little Annie Rooney …

  Again, she had to wrench her attention back and started to look round the table, from place to place, at the neat way Oscar sat with his papers piled tidily in front of him; at Kidd and Chesterfield side by side, both industriously scribbling notes; at Catherine Warne doggedly smoking her way through a cigar (“Why shouldn’t a woman use cigars?” she had said pugnaciously when Sam Lemesurier had wrinkled his nose at them. “They’re a bloody sight safer than those cigarettes of yours, and anyway I like ’em.” Poor Catherine. Aching for male approval and not knowing it. She should have married and had hordes of children; but that thought made her smile a little. Catherine, with children!). At Sam, fiddling as always with a box of matches, piling them into towers as he squinted over the smoke rising from the cigarette dangling from his lips; and young Rodne
y Ackermann, sitting with his hands carefully folded on the table, his head bent politely toward Geoffrey as he listened. So transparent his excitement at being a member of the Establishment, so hopeful in his just-down-from-university newness. He made her feel decidedly maternal.

  Yet he was justified in finding research so exciting; even after so long in the field, she found it exhilarating, sitting here waiting to tell them of her own success. For she knew now, quite certainly, that she had succeeded. Yesterday’s nervousness had quite gone. But she had had to wait a long time for this morning. Did Rodney realize that? she wondered. That she had been working here for more than a quarter of a century, God help her! and for the first time had come up with a piece of work that would really mean something? Would young Rodney last so long, going from tedious routine work to disappointment to more routine work to minor achievement, and back, yet again, to routine work?

  Though perhaps he wouldn’t have to wait so long. William Ross-Craigie hadn’t. Wouldn’t. She could in one way sympathize with the way he had refused to tolerate Oscar’s ponderousness, with his decision to go where the speed of success was greater. But she could sympathize with Oscar, too. Sitting at the head of this rather mediocre research Establishment, and knowing there was less of his working life in front of him than behind him, he needed to exercise his authority.

  With a start, she realized that Geoffrey Cooper had stopped talking. “Discussion?” Oscar was saying. “No.” Well, I don’t see there is much any of us can say. Clearly, you need at least another two series before you can make any real assessment of the method. I think we can budget for one more, at least, at this stage. But I hope you’ll be able to give us a little more solid evidence—if you will forgive the pun!—next time. Er—Theo, you’re prepared to go on working with Geoffrey on this?”

  “I can’t pretend I find it quite as interesting as Geoffrey does,” Theo said lazily. “Paddling about in those enormously fat bellies you send me isn’t precisely an aesthetic experience, dear boy. However! If it gets too depressing I can always close my eyes and think of England.”

  “As long as you don’t close them for too long,” Geoffrey said. “I have enough trouble getting patients to cooperate without losing them on the operating table, thank you very much.”

  “Trust me, Geoffrey, trust me! I haven’t killed one yet, tempted though I may have been—”

  Irritably, Oscar said, “Time is moving on, gentlemen. Now, what next? Harriet, I see you have a long report to give. Will there be much discussion, do you suppose? If so, perhaps I should get my own short report out of the way first.”

  “I think there might be,” Harriet said. “I’ve made considerable progress.”

  “Indeed she has,” Theo murmured, and Oscar looked at him sharply. “I know I’m merely the surgical member of this team, Oscar, but I want to talk a little about Harriet’s report. I rather imagine everyone else will.”

  “Hmm. Very well then. My own report.” He sat in silence for a moment staring down at his papers, and then said stiffly, “Not too good, I’m afraid. I ran trials on eighteen terminal cases, and on a series of twenty-seven medians. And although there would appear to be enough evidence to warrant continuing along the lines I planned, I can’t pretend there is anything to get too excited about …”

  He launched into an account of the results of his work in the States, and now Harriet listened carefully, making notes of the figures he gave. Indeed, not too hopeful, yet not so disappointing that they warranted abandoning the use of the drug. Every new derivative of the nitrogen mustard drugs behaved like this, she told herself. Some remissions of disease, occasional total remissions, but nothing that ever made a pattern, that offered the blanket treatment that Oscar was so obviously seeking.

  For a brief moment she wondered how Oscar was going to react to her own report. She had assumed, if she had thought about it at all, that he would be pleased, that he would share her own excitement, but if it meant—as it clearly would—that his own research project would lose its validity, would his pleasure be tempered by any other feeling? But there was no time to pursue that thought, for Oscar had stopped speaking, and was looking round the table, waiting for comments.

  Geoffrey Cooper, more relaxed now that he knew his own work was assured for at least the next six months, spoke first.

  “Well worth continuing, I would have thought, Dr. Bell. At least no one else, as far as we know, is working on the same lines—”

  Oscar reddened, angrily, and Harriet bit her lip. Tactless idiot! Surely the man realized that Oscar was still smarting under Ross-Craigie’s defection and success? Her uneasiness grew; was her report going to be tactless, too, in something of the same way?

  “Thank you, Cooper. Does anyone feel I should take this off the budget, perhaps? I’m the first to admit these results aren’t very striking. Kidd? Lemesurier? Chesterfield?”

  The other men shook their heads, but it was young Ackermann who jumped in, his face a little pink.

  “But of course it must go on, sir! There’s as much value in disproving a method as proving one, isn’t there? I mean, you took me on here because of disproving the Döpel theory on the enzyme action of copper, not because—I mean—well, I’d go on if I were you.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Ackermann,” Oscar smiled fleetingly. “You all agree then? I continue with this—for the next six months, at any rate.”

  “Agreed,” Kidd murmured.

  And Oscar nodded, made a note, and leaned back in his chair.

  “Thank you. Now, Harriet. We’re ready for you. Perhaps you had better recap, for young Ackermann’s benefit. He’ll hardly have had the chance to find out yet what it is you’re doing, and I want to be sure everyone’s always clearly in the picture.”

  “By all means. In very brief and simple terms, I started two years ago on an idea involving the action of viruses in healthy cells. Reports from a number of sources—I’ll give you the references later if you want to read them for yourself—indicated that new cancerous growths might be triggered by virus invasion of a cell, in which the virus RNA changed the cell structure into new RNA that resembled that of the virus. This theory I found very attractive. It accounts for the great numbers of types of tumor that occur, explains why so many different forms of treatment can be used for different forms of the disease. Some respond to radiation, some to cytotoxic drugs—like the one Oscar is now investigating—and so on. Well, it seemed to me that if an invading virus could change a human cell into a replica of itself, as it were, why shouldn’t the cell be made able to change back by the action of another virus? I thought, if I could find a way of developing a new virus-type body that was the same as the healthy cell, and expose this to cancerous growths, to see if it could change the growth back into normal tissue—do you follow me?”

  “A reversal of the neoplastic process, you mean?”

  “Yes. In a way. So I started on a series of animal experiments—rats first and then capuchin monkeys. I have the results here if you want to see them—trying to grow healthy-cell-type viruses in specimens obtained from various types of tissue. Skin to start with, and then intestinal, and later respiratory system. It took a long time—there were a lot of false starts—but then I did start to get the cultures I wanted. I could, as it were, structure a virus-type body that would turn the key the other way. As long as I grew them on healthy tissue taken from the subject, I could reinject and grow them in the living animal, and—well, I got some very good results.”

  “A sort of auto-immunization method?” Ackermann asked.

  “In a way. But not precisely like the methods a number of people are trying. I know, of course, about the several ways in which people are enhancing the production of interferon, which enables the body to reject foreign bodies, including cancerous growths, but this method doesn’t work that way. This acts directly on the growth itself, changing cancerous cells back into normal ones. It doesn’t leave great masses, however. If a growth has become very large, and I get
a successful reversal started, the healthy cells seem able to recognize the presence of the excess cells, and they are reabsorbed. I’ve got a most interesting series of pictures—you can see cells joining together, diminishing in number. It’s almost like watching a series of cell-division pictures run backward. It was this I reported at last conference, and I was given an extension to work further.”

  She looked at Oscar fleetingly. “I embarked on some massive animal trials at that point. I used over three hundred monkeys—a hell of a risk, I knew, because if I’d failed, the costs would be pretty grim. And the Establishment wouldn’t have been very pleased with me.” A faint ripple of laughter greeted that. “But I thought it justified on the grounds of my early results, and I’d refined the tissue culture technique considerably. The details are here if you want them. Anyway, I got a good result.”

  “Good!” Theo said. “There, my dear, is the understatement of all time. Only a hundred percent, that’s all!”

  “A hundred percent?” Ackermann almost squeaked it. “You got a proven positive result on every animal experiment?”

  “Yes,” Harriet said simply.

  “Good God,” Kidd murmured. “You kept very quiet about it, Harriet! I knew what you were trying, but—a hundred percent? Are you sure? What about spontaneous remissions? They do happen …”

  “How often7” Theo said swiftly. “Even if you got a spontaneous remission in fifty percent—which you never do, as you know quite well—have you ever heard of any series that got this sort of total response? Believe me, if you can’t believe Harriet. I’ve seen those animals. They’re all alive and well and living at Brookbank, every damned one of them.”

  “I believe it!” Kidd protested. “I’m not making any snide cracks, Theo—I’m just shattered!”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Oscar said sharply. “Why not, Harriet? I would have thought—”

  “You weren’t here when I made the final checks, Oscar,” Harriet said quickly. “I could have cabled you, I suppose, but I thought—well, you were involved in your own work, and what point in telling you there in the States? I decided to wait until you came back. And then …” She hesitated.