The studio slid into an uneasy hissing of talk, of barely concealed impatience, and the apprehension that had gone away as Harriet had watched Lister play with the audience as though it were his yoyo (and it had pleased her to see that neither Theo nor Ben had joined in the applause, perturbed her a little that Patty had at first and only stopped responding when she noticed that Ben wasn’t)–that apprehension returned, but now she could tolerate it. It sat inside her like a heavy cold wetness, but it was familiar now, and no longer quite so disagreeable. Indeed, there was an almost sensuous enjoyment to be had out of this feeling that was so very physical, and she thought suddenly, “Adrenalin. That’s what it is. I wish I knew how it worked, how it made these specific sensations. Now, there’s an interesting idea. I wonder if I could mount an experiment to monitor the effects of adrenalin—” and then irritated at herself, tried to pull her mind back to the here and now.
She looked at Theo, who produced the ghost of a wink; at Patty and Ben, talking softly to each other; at Sir Daniel Sefton, sitting with his crossed feet outstretched, and his gaze fixed on the shining toecaps of his shoes as he rhythmically and very slowly rocked them to and fro; at the audience sitting perched in their rows—“Like a lot of silly hens,” she thought suddenly—and then, sideways, at Ross-Craigie, who was now sitting, arms folded in a positively Napoleonic pose, staring seriously at the audience.
From somewhere behind her she heard the thin tinny sound of music, and it rose and spread, and the audience heard it too, and stopped its soft chatter and looked expectantly up at the monitors, and she looked up too, to see words rolling up from the bottom of the screen, swelling and then shrinking as they disappeared at the top. Behind the words, she saw the audience in its rows, looking somehow much more vast than it actually was, and then saw, very small and neat, the dais with Ross-Craigie brooding on one side of the central chair, and a squarish rigid figure on the other. “Me,” she thought, in wonderment. “How absolutely ridiculous, sitting up there like that.”
For a moment she felt like a child again, a child who had played a private and rather frightening game of being two people, one the real Harriet sitting on the floor painting or brickbuilding or doll-dressing, the other a small nasty cruel Harriet who sat up in a corner of the room, on the little jutty shelf where the picture rails met beside the window, watching and jeering and disapproving. It had been a difficult game to control then, and now it was much harder, but she made herself pull her staring gaze away from the screen, and made herself look instead at the audience in front of her, all seeming like those drawings of Christmas angels that appear on calendars and cards, with the upward-thrown monitor-worshipping expression repeated on face after face.
From behind the camera group came a movement that split the cluster of men in two, and he came through the little aisle they made, his face relaxed and bearing an expression that cried isn’t—all-this-amusing? The audience began to clap in response to Lister’s violent gesturing, and J. J. Gerrard ran lightly up the steps to the dais, threw himself into the central chair, and turned and smiled at Ross-Craigie, who stared back at him somberly, responding only with a serious nod; and then he turned and leaned toward Harriet and murmured, “Butterflies inside? I have, I swear it–always do! But it makes for a good program—” And then he was holding up both hands as he looked at the audience and they stopped the clapping and sat up straight and expectantly as he looked around with his so-familiar lopsided smile.
“Well, good evening, and welcome to all of you, both here and at home, welcome as always to ‘Probe.’ I am your regular guest, grateful to be admitted to your living rooms once again, J. J. Gerrard! Thank you for inviting me, all of you at home, thank you for coming to the studio all of you here. Right, now, and what have we on the agenda for this last Friday evening in October? Let’s see now—next week, as you may know, the witches and warlocks ride, come Hallowe’en, and in the second half of the program we are going to introduce to you one of the most way-out witches you ever saw! Oh boy, there’ll be some spells cast here, I promise you, tonight! But right now we are going to concern ourselves with something very different …”
His voice changed, and the bantering note was replaced by a slightly ponderous solemnity.
“Tonight, we are privileged to have with us in the studio two very remarkable people. Both are British. Both are scientists. Both have been responsible for remarkable breakthroughs in medical practice. One of them, I am quite confident, will be next year’s Nobel prizewinner. The other, I am happy to tell you, is this year’s Nobel prizewinner. And we’ll talk to him first, if our lady guest will forgive us. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Dr. William Ross-Craigie!”
Applause, brisk, staccato and perfunctory, when compared with that with which J. J. Gerrard had been welcomed. Questions from J. J. Gerrard, crisp, simple, seeming to cry, “I’m-as-bright-as-the-next-man-but-you’ll-have-to-explain-in-honest-language,” with every syllable. Then, William Ross-Craigie’s voice, with its mid-Atlantic fiat classlessness, talking, talking, talking.
To Harriet, it all had a dreamlike quality at first, an air of absurdity; what was she, Harriet Berry, doing sitting up here like a monkey on a stick, listening to men with painted faces talking in such lumpy phrases, sentences, paragraphs, not at all as men normally spoke?
But then, arch and ridiculous though Ross-Craigie sounded to her ears, she began to be aware of the content of what he was saying. She began to listen to the sense of his speech, rather than the sound of his voice and the shape of his sentences, and relaxed, grateful for the comfort of things known, the sort of ideas she herself used as part of her stock in trade.
“… the theories about fat in the diet, about exercise, stress, all of that, though it kept the popular press happy for years, and made a bonanza for manufacturers of low-fat foods and exercise machines and the like, still had all too little effect on the basic disease—atheroma.”
“Ah, now Dr. Ross-Craigie, here you must forgive me if I interrupt. Atheroma? Can you explain to us precisely what that is?” J. Gerrard said brightly.
“By all means. Well, now, the word derives from a Greek word meaning gruel. Groats—as in hominy grits—er—porridge, you know?” Gerrard and Ross-Craigie exchanged a knowing cosmopolitan smile. “And it describes a condition in which plaques—that is to say, layers of this gooey sticky substance are laid down on artery walls. Now, just imagine the underground system here in London, or the subway in New York, or the metro in Paris or wherever, with the walls coated with great slabs of thick sticky gruel-like material. Every time a train went by—a train, by the by, loaded with more of the same sticky substance—what would happen? I can tell you what would happen. The layers would get thicker and thicker, and finally the trains wouldn’t get through the tunnels! It is this that happens in the disease of atheroma. The arteries are the tunnels, and they silt up, and silt up, and eventually—no blood supply to vital organs! Coronary thrombosis! Heart attack! In some cases, cerebral thrombosis, which could be called a brain attack. Popularly known as stroke, or by some old-fashioned people as apoplexy. Now, I have always been very interested in this matter of atheroma. I looked at the literature all the time, I watched what other researchers were doing, I listened to the theories about diet, about the effects of cholesterol on atheroma plaque formation, and I thought—well, I just didn’t find those ideas jelled with me, they just didn’t jell one little bit.”
“And when did you first start thinking along the lines that led you to your final breakthrough, Dr. Ross-Craigie? Can you remember a day when you said, ‘Wow—that’s it—here I go,’ or is that too much to expect?”
“Ah, well now, J.J. that’s one of the great myths of science, you know? Like a Hollywood B feature of the thirties era, that idea. I spent years—would you believe?—many many years thinking about the possibilities of finding an answer to the problem, long before I actually started practical work. No, no one can say, ever, that the great breakthrough comes like a fl
ash of lightning. Believe me, I wish it did.” He smiled wryly. “That would be so easy! As it is, I have had to work very hard, very hard indeed, to give a shape to the ideas I formulated.”
“Well, at this point, Dr. Ross-Craigie, can you tell us how your revolutionary treatment operates?”
“With pleasure. Well, now, in brief and simple terms, I link up a patient to a special machine, a little like the well-known kidney machines used to extract unwanted toxins—ah—poisons—from the blood of people with kidney failure. Then, I pass his blood through special chambers which contain a solvent material. I won’t go into the highly complex chemical structure of the solvent at this time; I’m sure your audience would be very bored by such highly technical stuff, but I can tell you that it derives from a radioactive isotope, which is very precious and costly, incidentally, and has the effect of actually attaching the blood substance that causes atheroma to the special membranes over which the blood containing the solvent passes. Are you with me? Yes? Great—great. Right. The patient lies there, and his blood passes over the membrane, and the solvent draws out the atheroma-causing substance, and deposits it on the membrane. And we keep changing the membranes, cleaning them, putting them back in the machine. Then, we do the next step, a more complicated one. We actually inject the solvent into the body to get at the really heavy layers. Oh, boy, but this is a difficult step indeed, indeed! We have to watch that patient like a hawk, on account of big pieces of atheroma plaque might break off, get jammed up in the heart or the brain somewhere—and then we’re in trouble. That stage took a lot of planning, but we solved it. We track the atheroma in the vessels by using very sensitive Geiger counters and a new very sensitive stethoscope, which can actually hear where arteries are clogged, and if we find a big piece traveling—why we just go in after it.”
“You mean, you perform an operation?”
“We surely do. We’ve had to do it only a few times, but we always—believe me, always—manage to find the piece and extract it. You see, with a Geiger counter chasing a radioactive substance, it’s as good as being able to walk along a person’s arteries with a torch! You can actually see what you’re doing!”
“I imagine this is why the treatment can only be given in special centers? Where you can operate in a hurry if need be?”
“Yes, indeed. I require not only a specially prepared laboratory where I can carry out my researches—and I’m now seeking a way to avoid having to use surgery to catch drifting pieces of atheroma. I’ll dissolve those wicked little pieces away yet, I promise you—but a well-equipped ward for patients to be in, an operating theater, a follow-up clinic, as well as, of course, the actual treatment room with its machine for using the solvent.”
“So this is an expensive treatment?”
“Ah, yes. Yes, that is so. Pretty darned expensive. But—” he shrugged—“how do you evaluate the cost of a life? For myself, I’d reckon to spend a lot of money on my life if I had to. Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, now that’s a question, a very long question, we will consider later. But right now, I’d like to ask you this. This treatment–can it work for everyone and anyone? Can any patient, however ill, be helped?”
There was a brief silence, and then Ross-Craigie said heavily, “No doctor, no scientist, would ever dream of claiming a hundred percent success with any treatment. Having an appendix out is a very commonplace operation these days, very safe, very curative, but still, some people—a very few, but some—die of the illness every year. But I will say this about my treatment. So far, every patient I’ve used it for has done very well. I’ve treated a man with a heart so clogged up—well, I can tell you, he’d had seven, would you believe, seven coronary attacks, and survived them, but there could be little doubt the next would have killed him, and less doubt still that it could happen at any moment. He had his atheroma dissolved and extracted from his system, and he is just fine now—just fine.”
A thin splatter of applause started, thickened, and spread, and J.J. let it run for a moment before holding up one hand and speaking above it. “A remarkable achievement, Dr. Ross-Craigie—truly remarkable. And this treatment can be used for any patient?”
“Ah—within reason, yes. That is, any patient who can be got into a special unit where the treatment is available. It can’t be applied in the G.P.’s surgery, that’s for sure!”
“Well, now, that brings up a whole new set of questions, but with your permission, I’d like to leave you for a moment and turn instead to our other honored guest tonight, a lady who has in her way done something equally remarkable in another field of medical endeavor. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Harriet—Berry!”
She sat stunned for a moment, for she had almost forgotten what she was sitting here for, so absorbed had she been in Ross-Craigie, so busily trying to work out what lay behind the bald oversimplified statements he was offering his listeners. Now she sat and blinked a little at J.J.’s face smiling happily at her, and said, a little brusque in her embarrassment, “Good evening.”
“And good evening to you!” he said as the applause, obediently rising and falling in response to the signals Lister was industriously producing in his corner, frittered away. “May I thank you for coming here tonight, Dr. Berry? I know you weren’t very keen to come. May I ask you first of all why this was so? Why you would have preferred, as you told us when we first asked you to be here, to keep the news of your breakthrough a secret just yet?”
“I don’t think I said anything about secrets,” Harriet said, a little hoarse with nervousness. “I agree I didn’t want to talk about it. But as for secrets—well, it’ll all be published in the professional journals in due course, so it will hardly be a secret.”
“Ah, yes. No doubt. But not many of us read the professional journals, hmm?” He swept a bright blue gaze over the audience which immediately produced the required trickle of laughter. “But you were unwilling to talk. Why? When what you have done is so remarkable?”
Wearily, she began to explain, haltingly at first but then with greater assurance, the difference between a proven and attested treatment and/or cure, and a single success with a human patient, even though that human success followed animal trials of much greater success. She felt as though she had used the same words over and over again, as indeed she had, with Mr. Monks, with James McClarrie, with Sir Daniel Sefton. Surely they’re bored, hearing it all again? a corner of her mind asked her, but she plodded on, explaining, explaining, explaining.
When she stopped, J. J. Gerrard nodded heavily, and turned back to his audience.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, you don’t have to take only my word for it that all Dr. Berry has told us about her treatment is true. That she has succeeded in curing—I’m sorry, Dr. Berry”—he turned back to her and bowed slightly—“that she has succeeded in the care of one human patient. You don’t even have to take only Dr. Berry’s word for it, transparent as it may be to all of us that what she is telling us is no more than the bare truth. No, use your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen. Let me introduce to all of you”–he stood up and stepped forward, off the dais, and ran with lithe youthfulness up the center steps between the rows of audience, while people turned and peered after him and the camera swooped its black eye in his trail, to the very back of the studio where shadows lay thicker. A sweeping spotlight followed him, outlined his broad back as he leaned over someone sitting at the very end of the back row. Then, he turned and came down the steps leading before him the small and rather shabby figure of James Ferris, who almost hopped from step to step in his delight, grinning hugely at everyone he passed, and nodding and becking like a mechanical bird.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce—James Ferris, the man who didn’t die of cancer!” J. J. Gerrard cried, and Ferris jumped up onto the dais, almost tripping over his own feet in his hurry, and the camera turned and bowed to follow him, and then he hurried across the orange carpet to Harriet’s chair, to seize her hand and shake it furiously.
“
‘Allo, Dr. Berry! It’s good to see you, I can tell you! Best bloody woman in the ’ole world, that’s what you are, and I don’t care ’oo knows I said so—” And awkwardly, he lifted her hand in both of his and held it to his cheek, while behind him the audience clapped and cheered its approval.
9
THE EFFECT he had on her was quite extraordinary. She was filled with a compound of amusement and embarrassment, anger and affection, and an almost desperate desire to protect him. He looked so absurd standing there holding her hand to his cheek and she wanted to pull her hand away, to smack him with it, and then to scold him and take him away and tuck him safely in bed at Brookbank again; but threading through all that was the heavy black ribbon of anger. How dared he behave so, how dared he posture about in this witless beady-eyed fashion, holding himself up for the entertainment of these gawping stupid people? She had a sudden vivid memory of herself standing beside a small Gordon and Patty at the zoo, watching a monkey handle its genitals while it stared at them with the same sort of unwinking beadiness, and felt the same hot shame she had felt then, not because of what the monkey was doing, but because it had made her party to it, involved her in its behavior so intimately; and she pulled her hand away almost roughly.
The applause thinned as J. J. Gerrard led Ferris to a chair that one of the studio staff had pushed onto the dais, and sat down again himself.
“Well, now, Mr. Ferris, how do you feel about Dr. Berry and her work? Are you worried about the difference between a proven cure that has to wait years to get the seal of approval and—”
“Am I worried?” Ferris cried perkily. “Worried? Me? That’s a laugh! What’ve I got to worry about? If I die tomorrow, I tell you I’ve no complaints, none at all. Bunce, that’s what I’m havin’ now, bunce! Lots o’ profit. Every day I live now, feelin’ great, is one Dr. Berry’s given me, and I don’t care who knows how I think about her. A right bloody marvel, that’s what she is.” And the audience laughed, and clapped and rustled with pleasure.
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