A Time to Heal

by Claire Rayner

  “I’m sorry. But even I have my feelings and sometimes—Look, don’t ask me what to do. Ask Mr. Fowler, or—”

  “I’m not asking you. I’m not asking anyone. I’m sick and tired of asking other people what I should do. The more I try to do the easy thing, the quiet thing, the more I try to keep everyone happy, the worse it gets. I’ll manage on my own.”

  Catherine smiled faintly. “Well, good for you. I never could see why you consult other people ever, the way you do. You never do when you’re working on a project, do you? You just think it out for yourself and get on with it. But whenever it’s anything else, you–well, forgive me for saying it, but if we’re being honest, I might as well—you flap around like a wet then very often. I’m glad I never had any family.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “A lot. All these emotional things—ruins a woman. I saw the way my mother was ruined by the stupidities of my father. And the way she got when my brother—anyway, I made up my mind then, years ago, I wasn’t going to be torn into strips of useless rubbish by other people. Once my mother died, I stopped caring about anyone. Miller of Dee, that’s me. I care for nobody and nobody cares for me. And I was right to choose that way, and you’re the proof. A mind like yours, and you let yourself be pulled one way by Mr. Fowler and another way by that Bell man, and then your son and daughter—”

  “For someone who cares for nobody you seem to have given a lot of thought to my affairs!” Harriet said a little sharply.

  Catherine’s face became suddenly scarlet, and then the redness drained away and she looked white and pinched.

  “It’s your work I care about. Not you. Not personally,” she said stiffly.

  There was an embarrassed silence, and then Harriet said gently, “I’m sorry. Of course you have every right to say what you please. We’ve worked together a very long time, after all. And you’re right—I do flap about sometimes, and I need to be told. And I do let Theo and Oscar—well, I can’t help it. They’re my friends, both of them, and I need them. What else can I do?”

  “Stop caring,” Catherine said. “Don’t have friends, don’t get involved with people, and life runs a lot smoother.”

  “That’s easily said. But I do care, and I can’t turn it off like a tap. Emotional things—they don’t work that way. You got emotional a moment ago. Could you have turned that off like a tap?”

  Catherine stood very still, in her characteristic stance of arm-folded stolidity, staring at the floor, and after a moment looked up and her face was as closed and wooden as it usually was.

  “So what are you going to do? I won’t advise but I’m interested.”

  There was a pause, and then Harriet smiled faintly and nodded.

  “What am I going to do? I’m not quite sure—let me think.”

  She began to prowl about the room again, her hands back in her pockets, and her chin tucked into her neck.

  “I could try to contact Ben and ask him what the hell he’s trying to do and ask him to stop meddling, but knowing the little of him that I do, I doubt that’d have much effect. And you could be right about his political motives, and if you are, he’s even less likely to–no, forget Ben. I could call the Clarion and tell them there won’t be any cancer treatment being sold to the highest bidder as far as I’m concerned—but you know what that will do, don’t you? They’ll start howling for the treatment to be made available here, and I’ll have to say—again—that it can’t, and we’ll be no better off. All my instincts tell me to lay low and say nothing. To just sit tight and hope they’ll forget all about me. They’ve got Ross-Craigie to play with, and he loves the publicity bit. Am I being specious, Catherine? Looking for the easy way out again, instead of really thinking it through properly?”

  Catherine looked back at her, her face expressionless. And Harriet grimaced slightly and shook her head.

  “Oh, all right. So I am! But I can’t be doing with getting any more embroiled with these bloody papers than I have to. So I’ll let them get on with it, and I won’t have anything to do with it. There! I’ve decided.”

  “Shall you go to this mass meeting in London tomorrow?”

  “Go to—? Good God, why on earth should I?” Harriet said in amazement.

  “Might be informative. And you might just as well go as sit here twiddling your thumbs. There’s no work you can do, not until the powers-that-be stop being so stupid and let you start a new patient. I’m nearly driven mad with it—as you’ve seen—having so little to do like this. I’ll go with you, if you like. Caister’ll be here to hold the fort and look after the animals. It’d be interesting, at the very least, to see what they get up to. If we go down by train, first thing in the morning, we could be there well before two o’clock.”

  11

  SHE STOOD with her coat collar pulled high around her cold-reddened ears, her hair blown irritatingly in her eyes by the biting November wind, staring up at the back view of Nelson on his column and wondering bleakly why she had agreed to come. What good would it do? She should have stayed at home, and no doubt seen what there was to be seen on the television news.

  She could see the Outside Broadcast cameras below her in the Square, stolid islands in the middle of the swirling mass of humanity, and a little farther along the pavement edged by the stone balustrade against which she and Catherine were leaning another camera van was setting down its load.

  The Square was filling fast now; so was the pavement on which they were standing, but up here were people like themselves who preferred the clear view offered by this higher vantage point in front of the National Gallery to the more immediate excitement but limited vistas of the Square itself.

  “So young,” she thought as the color and sound and smell of the people all about her filled her senses. “So stupidly young—” and then was irritated by her own dreary middle-aged reaction; why assume that they’re stupid just because they’re young? she asked herself.

  Because they’re part of all this stupid interference I’m having to put up with. Part of all this time-wasting, pointless nonsense.

  “But it isn’t their fault,” her mind whispered back. “Is it? It’s newspapers and television programs and the rest of it.”

  And then as a tall boy with a scrappy little beard struggling to cover the spottiness of his thin cheeks, and wearing an old army captain’s greatcoat, squeezed himself into the small space beside her she realized why she had made so blanket a judgment of the crowds in the Square.

  “It’s Ben I’m really angry with,” she told herself. “Ben who’s being stupid—no, not stupid. Selfish and impulsive and ridiculous—oh, Patty, why did you have to get involved with such a tiresome creature? Why not find someone sensible and realistic and practical, like Gordon, to fall in love with?”

  “Because Gordon’s so dull,” the silent voice that was herself whispered back. “Be honest. You love him—he’s your son, and you love him, but he’s dull, dull, dull. Patty couldn’t have chosen a man like Gordon, any more than Gordon’s dreary little Jean could have chosen a man like Ben.” Harriet had to admit that angry as she now was with Ben, she liked him. He had a great deal of–something—charm? magnetism? personality? The words were banal, but there were no others she could think of.

  Irritably she pulled her attention back to the here and now, and stamped her feet a little to restore some warmth to their numbness, and smiled encouragingly at Catherine, who had turned to look at her.

  “Wish you hadn’t come, Catherine?”

  “They do make you feel a bit like God’s grandmother, don’t they?” Catherine said grudgingly. “There can’t be many here who’re over twenty-five. Most of them look as though they’re only here for the beer—silly giggling schoolgirls over there—see them? If they aren’t just here to pick up boys, I’m a green parrot. Mad, every one of them! Nothing in their bird brains but sex and boyfriends and yearnings for a lifetime spent up to their elbows in scum at the kitchen sink. Don’t tell me they give a
tuppenny damn about the uses of medical research.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Harriet said mildly. “Some of them look quite serious to me. Look at those there—see? The boys with the placards. Can you read what they say?”

  “Not quite—just a minute—” Catherine rooted in her pocket, and produced a pair of mother-of-pearl-encased opera glasses, which looked absurdly incongruous in her sensible green woolen-gloved hands, and peered through them at the knot of banner-carrying people far across the Square. They were clustered very close to the plinth of Nelson’s column, and some of their placards were almost hidden by the haughty upraised head of one of Landseer’s huge lions.

  “Move, you silly ass—” she muttered. “Ah, that’s better. Hmmph! Pretty predictable stuff. ‘The Third World Wants Food Not Miracle Cures for the Rich.’ A debatable point, that, though the sentiment’s worthy I suppose. And—there’s another—just a minute—ah, there it is. ‘Population Policy Should Come First/ First before what, I wonder? And—”

  “May I borrow those for a moment, Catherine? I think I’ve spotted Ben—see? Up there on the platform, by the microphone?”

  Catherine gave her the glasses, and Harriet focused and peered and there, neatly framed in the circle of her vision, was Ben, his face split by that characteristic wide grin as he stared upward. She swept the glasses upward, too, and saw just above him a long streamer being unfurled and stretched from one lion to the other. The words were big enough to be seen easily without the glasses.

  “WE WANT MORE ROOM AT THE TOP!” they cried in huge red letters. And below it, in only slightly smaller black letters, “Get the Dead Wood Off Our Backs. They Are Killing the Young Generation.”

  “I don’t quite see what that means,” Catherine said. “I thought this was all about the evils of money and the rest of it. Didn’t you?”

  “I think they’re starting. By God, Catherine, how many people are there here, do you suppose?”

  “Only God could count them. Twenty thousand? Thirty thousand? Who can say? It’s a hell of a lot, anyway—and noisy, too.”

  Someone had started to play an electric guitar up on the platform, and four people—their gender quite indistinguishable, for all wore fringed dungarees, heavy sweaters and long matted hair that obscured their faces—clustered around the microphones and began to shout or chant or sing; it was hard to be quite sure which.

  Below them, in a straight line across the front of the platform, Harriet could now see the bobbing blue helmets of policemen, and seeing them remembered the storybooks she used to read to the children when they were small, with their pictures of Toytown policemen with square wooden heads and stiff wooden bodies; but there was no coziness about those policemen down there; they didn’t laugh fatly in exchange for half crowns.

  Some of the crowd below and around them joined in the singing, and some sections were swaying from side to side, like lumbering circus elephants decked in gay colors and tinsel; it felt to Harriet like the moment just before the curtain went up in a theater; an atmosphere tense and expectant, but with an underlay of emotion that could become either approbation or hostility. Which it was to be would be determined not by the people who were to feel it but by the show they would see when the curtain rose.

  The singers and the guitar player at the microphones stepped back, and Ben moved forward to fiddle with the mouthpiece in an effort to raise it high enough for his great height, but still had to stoop to get his lips near enough.

  “People,” he shouted, and the amplifiers shrieked, and a huge laugh went up, and Ben grinned and fiddled again, and shouted once more, “People! Friends! You know why we’re here today—”

  Again his voice was drowned out, this time by a rapidly developing roar as an airplane swept close in overhead, looking like a cardboard cutout against the gray sky, and the pigeons swooped indignantly at the noise, and then settled again on the surrounding buildings, to huddle patiently and wait for the crowds to go away and give them back their Square.

  “There’s your bloody science for you,” Ben boomed cheerfully into the microphone as the noise died away, and the crowd laughed, and swayed good-humoredly.

  “Obviously a waste of time, all this,” Harriet thought irritably. “It’s more like an open-air pop concert than a genuine political meeting.”

  “You know why we’re here!” Ben’s voice echoed across the square. “All of us, young and healthy as most of us are, are here because of people who are old and ill. People who are dying. Old ill people always have died, always will. Jeez, they’ve got to! No one can live forever, and no one should! But we’re here today on account of the way history’s being changed under our eyes! On account of the way science is being used to stop old ill people dying. But only some old ill people—the rich ones. These capitalist spiders aren’t content with robbing the workingman blind, stealing his bread and his labor and his health. Now they’re using the money they’re sitting on and clutching with their wrinkled grabby greedy claws to take life away! Not just to buy lives for themselves, but to steal it from the poor and the young—us! Because believe me, brothers and sisters, believe me, when one old rich man is saved from the death he is more than ripe for, he steals from one of us the right to live, to breathe, and eat, and be. They’re shouting the odds about birth control, these slimy capitalist spiders, these stinking vultures, these useless dried-up hulks who’ve forgotten what life is about, they’re telling us we have too many children, that the world is overrun with humanity, that we’ve got to control our young blood and let our genes die with us—but they are going to use the bread that they stole from us to make sure they go on living—and living—and living—until they and their kind have choked us all off the face of the earth! Now I tell you, science was never meant to be used for the old and greedy! It’s for real people, the people who matter, the young ones with blood in their bones, and guts, and bellies! It’s to make the world a better place, not to silt it up with dead wood! I speak to you as a scientist, as a biologist, who knows, really knows, what a danger is staring us in the face.

  “For the first time in history, we’ve got the answer to one of the greatest killers of men, and almost got the answer to another. Science can now prevent the disease that leads to heart attacks and strokes, and very nearly can cure the diseases called cancer. The scientist who discovered this reckons the cure isn’t sure yet, but I’m here to tell you that I believe it is. I know how cautious science is, and I tell you, as a scientist that that cure is within our reach. And what does that mean? What will it mean? I’ll tell you—it means no more and no less than the end of our species as we know it! Because of this lousy capitalist pig society we’ve inherited, that our parents complacently tolerated, and that we’ve got to put right—because of these capitalists, I say, this scientific leap isn’t being used to save the young, the poor young who haven’t yet had the chance to make their lives of any value, but for the perpetuation of the rotten—the old, the useless and the dried up! But you don’t have to listen only to what I have to say about this. Here on this platform there are other people with other points of view—and you must hear them! First, there is Alfred Collins, who you all know—he’s been a big man in more ways than one in the trades union movement for a long time! He’ll put the point of view of the workingman, the real man. Then to prove to you we’re not just one-eyed and intolerant, which they’re always saying we are, we’ve got one of your actual capitalist spokesmen here—an economist, Angus Tirrell. Not himself a capitalist, but someone who really understands how money works, and what keeps the wheels of this society turning enough to crush us all under its weight! And then anyone else who wants to join in can have the use of our microphones–because this is a public meeting, a real public discussion, not one of your phony put-up television shows!”

  He threw his arms up and stepped back, and the crowd shifted and roared, and Ben shook his hands together, boxer style, over his head, and moved to one side to make room for a big man, round and heavy-bellie
d and with his jacket buttons strained to such a degree that Harriet could clearly see the gaps between them, even from her place far across the Square. He too held his arms up high, and the crowd roared cheerfully back at him, and he stood there beaming at them in a very avuncular fashion until the sound dropped a little, and he could shout into the microphone.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he cried. “Brothers and sisters, you haven’t heard the half of it yet! There’s more and worse in all this science stuff that’ll really make you sit up and think again, and think hard, you’ll see! Brothers and sisters—”

  “They’re a damned fraternal lot!” Harriet muttered, and Catherine grinned briefly and nodded her agreement.

  “—implications you’ve never imagined possible,” the fat man across the Square was booming. “Even if these treatments was to be made available to the man in the street, you and me, and your mums and dads, do you reckon that’d be the end of the boss class’s exploitation of the masses with them? Don’t you believe it! I can tell you, if we don’t watch it, don’t keep a close control over the uses of these cures, we’re goin’ to be back in a state of life that hasn’t been known since the industrial revolution shackled us all to the moneymakers! I’ve been doing a bit of investigating on my own part, doing some sums, and when you hear what answers I got, you’re going to be very sick—very sick indeed! Just listen to this!”

  He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers, and moving very deliberately took from another pocket a pair of glasses, and finally started to read into the microphone, but his voice sounded stilted now, with none of the free-rolling ease that had characterized it so far.

  “Present life expectancy of the average man in this country, sixty-eight years, or thereabouts. Estimated on the basis of present death rate from coronary thrombosis—”